141–150 of 166 posts
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Email is for stuff on the record, slack and teams not so much. Especially in client service.
Except it doesn't work like that. There is the expectation that you wake up and go and read all the messages in a Slack channel from when you stopped working yesterday until this morning. And because it's Slack it's not organized in any way shape or form. You don't know what's important and what not.
Fuck Zoom and the never-ending array of torture devices the executive class uses to keep people loathing and afraid. Your Slack indicator must be green 24/7. You must be living permanently in the Zoom uncanny valley. And it turns out that's not enough, so back to the office!
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Lots of people are incredibly bad at written communication. My theory is that people who worked remotely pre-Covid were selected one way or another to have above-average written communication skills. Covid suddenly brought everybody remote, and naturally the average communication skills for remote work dropped.
"My build pipeline is failing. Can you help me?" OK, which pipeline, what errors are you receiving, when did it last work, any changes since then, etc.? A lot of people aren't good at communication, period. It's like pulling teeth sometimes.
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I do this too. I usually cycle through a few people if multiple people have their camera on. I also take snips and draw mustaches/glasses/graffiti on them in paint during really boring meetings.
It would be hilarious if you suddenly or accidentally shared the screen with that artwork ongoing
I turn my camera off on big calls and it helps a bunch, there's a process running in the back of my mind when it's on that is constantly screening what I am doing just incase it looks stupid on camera. It feels like being in a panopticon. You never know if someone is looking. It's very tiring. I don't have the same issue in person because you know when people are looking at you in person and there's heaps of context…
Sometimes on a call where I'm familiar with everyone, I'll pretend my internet connection is being flaky and ask everyone to turn cameras off. I'm well aware I can just turn incoming video off, but most people aren't.
I don't have a flaky connection, but I hate having my laptop turn into a jet engine just so I can see tiny thumbnails moving around. On Teams I can easily turn off incoming video, but on webex (web client) I haven't found a way to do that.
One other thing not mentioned is latency. Zoom does a good job with this, but there are fundamental limits. This makes it more cognitively demanding to find the right moment to jump in, and if two people jump in at the same time, they have to resolve the conflict, which is slower than in-person. This also tends to lead to a style of conversation where one person talks longer. It's a little like email vs. slack. The c…
I'm in the same boat. Turn-taking in meatspace (i.e., what every person has experience with since learning language as a child) is totally ineffective in Zoom-land. My view is Zoom cannot be a true substitute for in-person meetings until there's low enough audio lag that geographically distant musicians can perform live with one another on the platform.
This seems like a pipe dream I think, since for low cost audio interfaces people can actually feel the few ms latency with those rigs going straight into their hardware. Anything going over the network has to go through an audio interface first, either with one of these dedicated rigs or the internal audio interface your computer uses for its built in microphone, then deal with network latency which will be significant in comparison I expect.
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I'm in the same boat. Turn-taking in meatspace (i.e., what every person has experience with since learning language as a child) is totally ineffective in Zoom-land. My view is Zoom cannot be a true substitute for in-person meetings until there's low enough audio lag that geographically distant musicians can perform live with one another on the platform.
I already usually have a difficult time jumping in on discussions in person. Zoom is SO much worse. This week I had wanted to point out that I already added a link with examples on something two folks were talking about on a doc, and after 5 minutes, I used the 'raise hand' feature, waited another 5, then just interrupted them because there was just no break to jump in, and no one noticed the raise-hand
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We must stop constantly lowering the bar. Let them learn to write, or don't hire them in the first place. Communication skill is a good hiring criterion.
I would not call it lowering the bar. People were always vad at writing. It is more of not raising the expectations too much.
At least in my experience, people who are bad at written communication are bad at communicating, period. The saving grace of spoken communication is that you can quickly see the lacking information and immediately ask for details, instead of going back and forth via email or other async medium.
Less meetings / more async isn’t always the best answer. Most people are terrible at written communication, and much better at spoken (which makes sense since most speak more than write). So even though it’s terribly unfortunate, for the masses, more times than not - meetings have a total net-gain effect vs async written.