Written communication is remote work super power

I gave a talk on this idea few years ago, that even just the metadata of slack messages was enough to make improvements to process. As a support engineer it was useful for us to see when we were asking questions in slack, what the patterns were to improve our team training:

Ticket comes in -> we don't know -> we link to ticket in X channel. Tally the channel links, look at chart, identify patterns.

In an office, this would require me to be an EXTREME micro manager, whereas remotely, I just paid attention and used the meta data to drive our training.

In an office, you could ask the team to keep track, or to tell you what they noticed, but by having a direct tap into the data stream, the team just does the work.

(This requires a high degree of trust, and we were looking _inward_ so it wasn't something that was met with disdain. If we were using this to compare what teams were more responsive and being outwardly critical, well, I don't think that will go over well anywhere.)

>For problems which are not well defined, and where a lot of decisions need to be taken, especially when they verge toward the arbitrary, it’s a lot easier to have people in a room and hash it out

Easier in what way? I think it makes people less frustrated by having to think hard about a hard problem, and feels "better" when everyone is saying what they think without any barriers, but I would guess it's much worse at arriving at good solutions to challenging business problems. Especially in the case you describe, with many decision points. I cannot fathom how a group of people chatting can efficiently work through many decisions at once, without laying it all out on paper anyway, whether it's before or after the fact. None of the meeting conversation matters unless you have someone taking good notes and summarizing decisions. Which makes me think, why not just start with the writing part? How is one person's notes about what a bunch of people said during a real-time conversation going to be even remotely on the same level as the people themselves composing their thoughts in writing? The in person meeting just seems like a space to share emotions and make shows of power in front of others.

I think async writing is much better (obviously nothing's perfect) for removing emotions from the discussion and forcing people to spend time thinking through their thoughts. The act of composing a written email, or composing a one-page spec document can do wonders for people ironing out their own thoughts and ideas.

And CC (+BCC) is, imo, the greatest business tool being dropped nowadays in favor of synchronous comms. CC keeps people informed without wasting time or disrupting schedules. It also allows the bosses to keep a much better handle on the comms culture of the company, since they obviously cannot sit in on or observe every meeting.

In person meetings have plenty of specific use cases, but I don't really understand the drive to make critical decisions synchronously in the moment during a meeting. Meetings are great for presentations, Q&A, gathering feedback, etc.

Actually funny this question. Because come to think about it, text is by far my preffered way to communicate.

That goes for work and for serious-private matters.

The absolute strengt with text is that it gives you history by default - you can save it.

While you can save text it's also eaiser to the search.

The mental model around writing and communicating is the mental proces that goes into it, and which is also the reason i disagree with people that believe you should be good at writing - if you haven't thought about what you want to communicate you can't write it nor speak about it. Why would you be better at communicating by speech rather than text? Sure it's faster to speak or video, but does that give a better result? I say no way

Are these screen recordings with narration or video recordings from a webcam?

Personal preference of course, but I'd be less able to express myself in a video recording than in an audio recording or written document, out of pure self-consciousness.

It's worth noting that some people specifically see verbal communication's undocumented-by-default nature as a feature.

When I was younger I found that idea very offensive. I considered people who held that viewpoint to be suspect (engaging in political machinations, or using fluid recollections of conversations to their advantage). I still think there's a grain of truth to my suspicions, but I've learned to recognize that there are acceptable reasons for undocumented conversations.