Meta’s Workplace is shutting down but the team communication problems it attempted to solve persist. Workplace helped teams prioritize asynchronous communication in a world where real-time chat can trigger excessive context switching.
This post clarifies the key problem Workplace attempted to solve and offers tips on what to consider when looking for a replacement, or looking to embrace asynchronous communication. The goal should be “Real-time sometimes, asynchronous most of the time.”
Background
Meta is shutting down Workplace, its business communication product. This isn’t a surprise, given that Workplace was a niche business and an unnecessary distraction for Meta. The shut down presents an opportunity for Workplace customers to optimize their communication patterns and conventions.
Workplace in the end offered a number of features, including integrated chat, but its use primarily centered around a news feed of written posts. Unsurprising considering the genesis of the product was Meta's internal use of Facebook for business updates in the earlier years.
The seminal book Peopleware accurately observed that “the major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature”. Almost 40 years later this statement holds true, there is something inherently flawed in how the average company communicates. This graphic from “is group chat making you sweat”, written in 2016 by Jason Fried, is incredibly prophetic:
In the past decade we’ve seen teams increasingly rely on ephemeral and synchronous communication, making it more difficult to focus and carve out time for deep work. Phrases like “I need to catch up on Slack”, or “how do I manage my notifications” are symptoms of the problem.
As Andrew Bosworth, the CTO of Meta succinctly put it, “Communication is The Job” and we need to collectively strive to be better at it.
What problem did Workplace solve?
It gave people a place to write.
Unfortunately many people simply don’t make the time to write, and who can blame them? Calendars fill up quickly and the longest meeting of them all, keeping up with chat, can eat away at focus time. Used correctly chat is magical but it must be limited to ephemeral and synchronous discussions, once it strays beyond that it becomes a unmanageable stream of collective consciousness that swallows higher signal content.
Longer form writing remains vital to deep thinking and clear communication. 37Signal’s Guide To Internal Communication succinctly captures the difference between chat and writing:
Writing solidifies, chat dissolves. Substantial decisions start and end with an exchange of complete thoughts, not one-line-at-a-time jousts. If it’s important, critical, or fundamental, write it up, don’t chat it down.
Another company famous for embracing the value of writing is Amazon. Jeff Bezos famously banned PowerPoint in meetings in favor of six-page memos:
According to Bezos, new executives are in for a culture shock in their first Amazon meetings. Instead of reading bullet points on a PowerPoint slide, everyone sits silently for about 30 minutes to read a "six-page memo that's narratively structured with real sentences, topic sentences, verbs, and nouns."
Greater writing discipline leads to more efficiency asynchronous communication and clearer thinking.
Workplace promoted longer form writing and asynchronous communication patterns. It has allowed me to share complete thoughts and to give them a permanent URL independent of chat.
What comes next
Companies will be tempted to embrace chat more in the wake of Workplace shutting down but that is a mistake. Chat is an inherently noisy tool, it’s an organization’s stream of consciousness, and there remains a need to give content with longer shelf life and higher signal a dedicated home.
Embracing asynchronous communication is the way. Some guidance on how to make that a reality follows:
Give people a place to write and publish long form updates. This should be separate to chat to avoid higher signal posts getting lost in the noise of chat.
All published posts must have a permanent, and easy to find, URL. Sharing documents that appear as drafts isn’t sufficient, posts should reflect thinking at time they are published and have a permanent URL.
Posts should be transparent across the company. Plenty of tools exist for private collaboration so it can be best to make all posts available to the entire company.
Reduce chat retention periods. The most contentious recommendation but reducing chat data retention clarifies that chat is intended for real-time communication, not as a long term store of knowledge. Content with a longer shelf life should live outside of chat.
Allow comments and reactions to posts. Asynchronous communication is two-way and employees need to be able to comment on and react to any post.
Transparently measure chat usage. A company’s communication patterns have a substantial impact on output and employee satisfaction. Overuse of chat can lead to excessive context switching which ultimately impacts output.
My ideal team communication tooling would include Basecamp for project management––due to its simplicity and the constraints it imposes, and chat that auto deletes after 1-7 days––to avoid chat ever being considered a permanent record. Let's see how Workplace customers evolve once it shuts down.
About Bryan Byrne
Software engineer turned product manager. Born in Ireland and moved to the US after college. Alum of successful and unsuccessful startups––amor fati.
