37signals — Group Chat: The Best Way to Totally Stress Out Your Team

Group Chat: The Best Way to Totally Stress Out Your Team

The perils of the modern communications conveyor belt that never ends, divides your attention, fractures your time, and chains you to FOMO.

Quick jump to:<br>Introducing the all-day meeting<br>The 4 positives of chat<br>The 17 negatives of chat<br>An attack on your attention<br>What to do about it<br>Getting off the chat conveyor belt

Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting, with random participants, and no agenda

Over the past few years, persistent group chat tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams have taken hold — and strangled companies. What began as a novel way to quickly communicate company-wide has become a heavy-handed interruption factory with serious consequences.

Now co-workers are expected to follow dozens of conversations in real-time, all the time. People are dedicating large fraction of their screens to a never-ending conveyor belt of conversation pile-ups. The mental overhead, and repetitive visual switchbacking, is exhausting. It’s repression through over-communication. People have had enough. The rebellion has begun.

Yes, chat is appealing. In the same way sugar is appealing. And cigarettes are appealing. It provides short term communication pleasure at the expense of long term organizational health. All sorts of things begin to go wrong when groups begin communicating in real-time, one line at a time, all the time.

At 37signals we’ve been using some form of group chat since 2006. We’ve experienced the impact of group chat for longer than most companies have been around. More than a decade of first-hand, extended-used experience has revealed some patterns and inconvenient truths. Group chat used sparingly in a few very specific situations makes sense. What makes a lot less sense is chat as the primary, default method of communication inside an organization.

We’ve also seen strong evidence that the method and manner in which you choose to communicate has a major influence on how people feel at work. Frazzled, exhausted, and anxious? Or calm, cool, and collected? These aren’t just states of mind, they are conditions caused by the kinds of tools we use, and the kinds of behaviors those tools encourage.

Software developers are prone to saying “well, then you’re using it wrong.” Or “it’s not the tool’s fault, it’s how you use it.” That’s a cop out. Tools encourage default behaviors, they dictate patterns and golden paths. These represent the tool makers’ ideal user experiences. If following along breaks your back, then it’s not because you tried to lift too much, it’s because the tool applied pressure in all the wrong places. The wrong defaults can damage morale and defeat organizations.

Based on our decade of discoveries, we’ve put together a list of the positive and negative impacts of group chat on an organization. If you’ve gone chat-first, or you’re considering heading down that path, we encourage you to review and consider these impacts on your own organization. And if you’ve already gone all-in, this document may be the catalyst for reconsideration.

The positives of chat

It ain’t all bad. In fact, chat is a great fit for a few things:

1. Hashing things out quickly

When you need to toss an idea back and forth between a few people, there’s nothing better than chat. Toss in some words, drag in a picture, get some quick feedback, and move on (just get out quick before you get sucked back in).

2. Red alerts

Sometimes it’s essential to get critical information in front of people. A server’s down, a deploy failed, there’s a crisis that truly demands a group’s immediate attention. There are a variety of ways to get this instant information to people, and piping it into a high priority chat room or channel is definitely one of those ways.

3. Having fun

Fun at work is as important as work at work. And chat really works well here. Culture develops, inside jokes flow, emoji, cat pics are circulated, and meme generators are perfect territory for the chat room or channel.

4. A sense of belonging

This is particularly important for people who work remotely. Having a chat room where you can just say good morning, let people know you’re out for lunch, and generally just feel part of something is a powerful counter to cabin fever.

The negatives of chat

Unfortunately, the cons are considerably more plentiful than the pros. Group chat as the primary method of communication can destroy morale, damage teams, and stress people out. Its impact is severe and far reaching.

1. Mental fatigue and exhaustion

Following group chat all day feels like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda. And in many cases, a dozen all-day meetings! You hear it from people all the time — it’s exhausting. Constant conversation, constant chatter, no start, no end. You can decide not to pay attention, but that leads to a fear of missing out.

2. An ASAP culture

Now! At its...