Email is ubiquitous and has been with us in common usage since the 1970s. Instant Messaging (Chat) is not as ubiquitous, but thanks to the mobile phone has been in common usage since the 1990s. Discussion boards and electronic video meetings also pre-date the internet, but have come into more common usage when products like Skype and Zoom became freely available in the past decade or so. 

Enterprise use of communications technology typically lags consumer use, with email not in common use until the late 1980s, when products from Lotus (later IBM) and Microsoft were adopted broadly. Chat took longer to take hold inside the enterprise, again when offerings became available from the regular office product providers IBM (SameTime) and Microsoft (Lync) around 2007 and beyond. It is only in the past decade or so that discussion-centred platforms like Yammer, Workplace from Meta, Jive, etc., became more ubiquitous in the enterprise. 

A smorgasbord of choices 

Today, while experiencing the most digitally intense working period ever, we have literally a smorgasbord of digital communication options. Like any good smorgasbord, you are spoiled for choice; and we all have our favourite go-to dishes. The difference is that your choice will have an impact on others you work with. If you choose to work in chat, then your colleagues have to as well. If you choose to work only in email, so will your colleagues. Digital communication use is like one large dating app! And the workplace is being forced to find “perfect matches” everywhere.

The above graph looks to capture the differing dynamics of the four different communication modes. The frequency of interactions (cadence) and the responsiveness are not now dictated by the technology used, but by “expectations”. For example, the time to deliver an email is often comparable with the time it takes to deliver a chat message. Expected response times have been studied in some detail by organisations that provide omnichannel support to their clients. In this context, when we send an email, our expectation of a response is in the hours and sometimes days. Chat, however, sets an expectation of a much faster turnaround, usually in seconds or minutes. Our benchmarking of enterprise social and Microsoft Teams channel discussions shows the majority of first responses come within an hour. 

The intended “reach” of the different modes is illustrated by the shading in the bars. The heavy shading area is looking to represent the “centre of gravity” for each mode. The emails we send typically would include just a few others. However, those in leadership roles could be sending emails to much larger groups. Threaded discussions tend to involve a much larger number of people, in fact the size of the Team or Community, which could stretch to hundreds. Chat and calls on the other hand are mostly one-on-one, with a few exceptions where additional members are added. Meetings, like threaded discussions, tend to involve more participants, but will have an natural upper limit, when compared with email and threaded discussions. 

The important point from this graph is that if you choose to ignore the expectations, it is possible to do all your work in one or two modes. In fact, it’s common for us to hear stories about individuals who only want to live in email or live in chat. The problem is, collaboration is a team sport. If your football team decided to allow members to choose their own individual coloured jerseys, the results would be disastrous. Effective collaboration requires your collaboration partners to agree on which modes of communications are going to be used for the different types of activities undertaken e.g. when should we meet?, when should we use a discussion thread over chat? Should we reserve email for external communications only? 

Technology trends 

Enterprise communication vendors are now clearly differentiating chat from threaded discussions. Chat is positioned as personal and mostly one-on-one. Threaded discussions have been added to enable their end users to conduct more ordered and focused interactions. For example, popular chat application Slack added threaded discussions precisely for this reason. Likewise, Workplace from Meta offers two separate mobile phone apps, one for chat and one for threaded discussions. Market leading collaboration platform Microsoft Teams also distinguishes between chat, which is aligned with calls and calendar/meetings of its predecessor Skype for Business and its Teams channel discussions. 

While vendors have their strengths and weaknesses, we see the market divides between platforms where collaboration principally occurs around documents; and platforms where people-to-people interactions are the focus (telephony). Microsoft M365 is arguably the only platform that provides comprehensive coverage of both.  

Our early benchmarking studies of M365 usage reveal some interesting patterns. We selected about 2,000 very active staff from across several organisations and plotted their synchronous activity (calls, chat, meetings) activity against their asynchronous activity (Yammer, Teams channels, SharePoint, OneDrive) and their email activity:

We found workers tended to partition into asynchronous and synchronous workers. Synchronous and asynchronous activity show a statistically significant negative correlation. We also found a statistically significant positive correlation between synchronous activity and email activity.  

We are seeing two distinct worker types; those that prefer using Outlook email/calendar/meetings/chat; and those with a preference for Yammer/Teams channels/SharePoint/OneDrive. This partitioning is problematic from a collaboration perspective. Only a minority of staff are effectively balancing their activity between all three worker types. We suggest the “balanced” workers have optimised their digital behaviours for maximum collaborative performance. 

The pros and cons of the different communication modes

The following table identifies the advantages and disadvantages of the different communication modes:

Knowing the pros and cons of each mode places us in a better position to balance and optimise their use. It is important there is consistency within the groups you participate in, to avoid the frustration of mismatched modes, when attempting to collaborate. 

“Balanced” worker decision process

To help with developing a common practice, the following flow chart is offered as a guide for developing a balanced digital working habits for internal communications:

This process flow is not intended to cover all the contexts you may become involved in, but it does illustrate the intent for balancing the different modes. 

As we move into a more hybrid way of working, the digital communication modes will become even more critical to our overall productivity. Remember that your personal choices will impact those you need to work with. It is best to set some ground rules at the start, rather than having to influence embedded habits in the future.