Team communication tools

Aug 6, 2018 · 9 min read

In a previous post I talked about communication, and what it’s like as a remote engineer. I also hinted at the tooling I prefer, and outlined what I look for. This post is going to cover off why I prefer Slack for team chat/communication.

Spanning a 10 year period I’ve used: IRC, Google Wave, XMPP in various forms, Skype, GTalk and Google Hangouts, Slack, Microsoft Teams and Workplace. Slack is a clear winner for me, although at the time Google Wave blew me away.

So, why Slack

Some of this is clearly going to be personal, so stick with me

• It’s fun and engaging.
• It is very clever with the real estate, both on a mobile device and the desktop/web - We can get a decent amount of content in the space and the intent of the messages is clear. As an example, in the same window area in Slack you can get about 15-20 messages. In comparison, Microsoft Teams it may only be 2-3 messages due to the way the message is designed.
• It has a clean user interface (I am not a UX/UI person here, just to be clear, so this is a personal observation).
• The mobile application is great and feels intuitive. It’s also lightweight on the data usage when you don’t have a WiFi connection.
• The notifications are appropriate for the system the application is running on. You can fine grain the notifications to be different on the Desktop and mobile applications. You can change the notification preferences globally or per channel. You can define a “Do not disturb” time frame for notifications. This is really important in a geographically distributed team. People can get involved when appropriate for them.
• You can track “Keywords” across the channels, and get notifications when these keywords crop up. This is handy to get involved in key discussions you are passionate about.
• It is easy to see who is online and present in a given channel.
• The Mac and Linux applications are first class citizens (because it uses Electron I suspect).
• It feels like IRC to me, with the slash / commands.
• It has all the integrations my team require: GitHub; Grafana; Jenkins.
  • The list of integrations/apps really does go on and on.
• The ability to add custom emoji and slack responses is a big win for the team. This can add meaning, context, familiarity that encourages teams to flourish. This may seem fluffy, but try it.
• Oddly, the ability to have multiple workspaces in one window is a great feature for me personally. I can have my team workspace alongside the Rands Leadership workspace.
• My personal experience (no science here sadly) is that Slack drives a higher engagement rate over the other tooling discussed in this post. I have used Slack and Microsoft Teams with the exact same team, and noticed the stark difference. We actually ended up adding WhatsApp to complement Microsoft Teams. (My team is a geographically and time zone distributed team).

Are there any downsides to slack?

• I personally feel the thread solution is a little clunky, however I am not a fan of threads anyway, so this isn’t a red flag for me personally.
• I hear people complain it uses a lot of memory, but I generally do not see any issues.

Recently I had to leave Slack and transition to Microsoft Teams at my current gig, but at the first opportunity (Change of politics etc), we moved back, much to the delight of the team. We now have more people in our Slack workspace than ever before. We have spread the administration around the team too, so we get some whacky slackbot responses and custom emoji for us all to enjoy.

How do I sell this to management

As with all things, I suspect it will depend on the type of management you have. I’ve had to sell this twice, the first time was a breeze and probably lasted about 10-15 minutes of waxing lyrical with the team nodding their heads in favour. We needed this tool. The second time is still ongoing, but I suspect it will need to involve pros/cons and evidence. In fairness, the first time was easier because we were trying to cobble together a Skype group chat, which at the time didn’t enable integrations. The second time, the department is already using Microsoft Teams. As the remote engineer critic in the team, I think “use” is overstating the case here every so slightly, especially in the communication arena.

Slack has three billing plans: Free, and two chargeable ones. My current team have been using slack for around 3 years on the free plan, and we are fine with this. However, the chargeable options do add some benefits, see here. I think the Group Chat and Screen Sharing are the items of interest. It will depend if you see value in them, and cannot, or do not want to use other alternatives.

How do I sell this to the team

For me, it comes back to what I said in this post.

Buy in

If the managers and leaders are there. If the monitoring tool posts data there. If every time you write “Make it so” Captain Picard appears. If every time you write “Good Luck” there is an animated gif of Leslie Nielsen from Airplane!. If this is the place, people flock to that place. And that builds the culture of the team. Teams are the most important aspect to all of this.

If you build it, [they] will come.

Field of dreams 💜

But with all things in life, it takes work to “build it”. My goal is to be able to deploy all our software from Slack. That will be a very happy day, and I’m not too far off 🎈

Microsoft Teams

If your company is Microsoft centric, and you rarely venture outside of that stack, Microsoft Teams is for you. Skip everything else said in this post. I wish you a fond farewell.

However, from someone who will promote Slack, here are some points I take away from using Teams (which I still do by the way).

• Clinical - It feels like a corporate communication tool, and in my experience, that can drive folks away.
• Threads - I think it is fair to say, that Threads is the main way to use this tool. For me, they seem to jump around, so I personally find it hard to keep up with chat in Teams. If there are 4 messages, and someone replies to message 1, that message/thread then jumps to the bottom, so it’s hard to scan what you have, and have not read due to the relationship of messages changing.
• Integrations for my big 3 are now there, but only recently was Grafana added. This relies on the open source community building the integrations. The biggest issue the team had was how terse and bulky the integrations were. When a build from Jenkins posted into the channel, we struggled to identify whether it was a good or bad build. That’s not what you want, you want it to be clear and concise (colours would help here, à la Slack).
• For me, on my Mac, Teams likes to refresh the entire window every now and again - This becomes mentally tiring.
• The mobile version - I am a proponent of mobile working (smart phone) and this was the red flag for me. When you use the mobile application it says “Syncing” and that uses vasts amounts of data. For me, in one month, it used over 200MB. In the same period for slack, for the same kind of usage it was around 30MB. I am not entirely sure what it is doing, but it became too costly. Ultimately I did not use the mobile app unless I had WiFi, which is a blocker for me to communicate.
• It is not very easy to see who is present in a given channel as members are linked to the “Team”, then a member can “follow” a channel. People can still see messages in a channel they do not follow, but will not get notifications. Because of this, it’s unclear who the messages will target.
• The notification system is not great, but has got a little better. You are limited to whether a notification is a banner or an email. You also can send notifications to the “Activity” tab, but I find this flat out confusing, and it’s very slow and compact.

Workplace

To note, I am not a Facebook user (over 3 years now). However, for a company communication tool, this is superb. I very much see Workplace (Facebook @ Work) as an announcements tool though and a way for teams to form departments. And for those departments to form “the business”. I would not advocate this over Slack/IRC/Microsoft Teams for a chat based team communication tool. It’s too delayed for that kind of activity. As a remote engineer I want the buzz/hubbub in a constant stream of information (as you would get in an office with a vibrant culture). Workplace is wait and see. Post. Wait. Responses come in.

One aspect of Workplace I like, in relation to email for example, is the view count. You can actually see who has viewed the post. This is better than email. How many times have you heard “Oh, I didn’t get that email”. There is a place on the internet over spewing with “those emails”.

The others

It seemed unfair to not talk about the others, but they are not really in the same league, nor to be fair to them, is it their goal.

I do remember the first time I used Google Wave though. It was a light bulb moment for me, and I would suggest that Workplace is a natural successor in this space.

Email

Email will be with us, forever. And it’s great, deployed in the right place. But, in the context of team chat, the pitfalls for me are.

• It’s isolated until someone decides Fred and Jessica should be in on it. Then Bob thinks Fred should be taken off, until 3 emails later when Jessica adds Fred back in (oh dear).
• It tends to end in fractional email threads. 50% are talking in one thread, 50% are talking in another thread. I’m in both threads getting confused (this is where the odd Captain Picard picture would help me get through it).
• It’s there, in your space, until you action it. I have to mentally scan emails and action them, be it delete, respond, archive. This is nuanced, but it takes mental cycles. In a team based chat application, you scan and move on.

What with all the spam emails, and requests to complete Health and Safety training, Email isn’t the safe place I would like.

Order of preference

If I was in charge, just for one day, I would champion the following:

• Slack - Team chat, DevOps monitoring, banter and water cooler conversation (I’m the remote drum banger here, so I want it all happening online for all to see and contribute).
• Workplace - Announcements and engagement with the wider business.
• Email - External communication and everything outside of my control (there is always something out of your control, even if you are the boss for one day 😋).

See also

• Collaborative Communication in a Remote Environment
• Rands in Repose - My go to, for years now
• Slack is the backbone of DevOps