*if the work allows it without putting anyone or anything in danger.
A common practice I’ve seen in engineering teams is to have a lot of private conversation about topics of common concern. I am not sure what is driving this kind of communication patterns, but they are not that healthy or necessary.
With the spread of tools like Slack, which allow low-effort asynchronous communication and puts the power on each user to what information flows they subscribe to, private communications should be kept to a minimum. If sending emails to too many people is disruptive, tools like Slack can be used for shared communication in a way that do not distract and disrupt, while giving the possibility to anyone who is interested to stay informed.
Here are a few examples:
Reaching out to the expert
_People who have been working for a while in a company and are good at what they do will be known as experts in their matter of expertise. Other people who need help within that matter will tend to reach out to them directly for help. _
Instead of reaching out to the expert in a private message, everyone should be encouraged to reach out in a shared channel around the matter of expertise. This way, there could be potentially more people who could help out and once a topic is discussed it can be accessed by anyone with the same issue or question. Experts are always good to have, but not as bottlenecks and silos of information. If discussions happen in shared channels, then it’s easier for others to become experts as well.
Incident response team
An urgent incident happens in production and the first line of support gathers the _troops in a shared private message. _
Best setup would be to have a shared channel for incidents and whoever is on call gets pinged in that channel by the first line support. Incidents and how they are handled contain a lot of useful information and putting all that information in direct messages is a huge waste.
After meeting follow-ups
Several people have a meeting and decide to create a shared private message to continue discussing the topics of the meeting afterwards.
Whatever is discussed in most meetings can be shared widely in the company. Not everyone might be interested in the subject, but many times it is hard to know who could benefit from that information. Therefore, as with the other examples, the conversation should be continued in a shared channel that fits the topic. To be less disruptive, the discussion can be done in a thread in the shared channel and the relevant people to be directly tagged in the thread.
Actually, some modern messaging tools create a private channel for every meeting automatically (I’m looking at you Microsoft Outlook and Teams). Most tools don’t do anything in this direction. I wish there would be a way to be able to highlight easily where the conversation should continue if need be when creating the meeting invite.
Conclusion
These are just some examples that came quickly into mind. There are many, many, many more. Bottom line is that most times you should not open a private message to talk to your colleagues. Most of the times, the conversation can have place in a shared discussion channel. Private messages should be kept for confidential and sensitive information (even fun stuff is better in public).
Shared-first communication takes more energy in the beginning, because messages have a different exposure and you cannot be quite sure who might be reading your message. It needs a bit of practice, but I think in the end everyone will benefit from it.