(2020-07-31) Improving Communication During A Global Pandemic Why Doist Broke Away From Realtime Communication

Improving Communication During a Global Pandemic: Why Doist broke away from real-time communication. Salihefendic wanted to create a structure where workers don’t feel pressured to respond to every message immediately.

Like many tech companies, Doist was an early adopter of Slack.com

Initially, they found the chat-room like nature of Slack “game-changing.” As Salihefendic wrote in a blog post, “Communication between team members across continents exploded. We shared ideas and gifs. (Lots of gifs.) We reported bugs and developed inside jokes. We celebrated successes and discussed ways to improve our work. Almost overnight, we went from a group of 30 individuals to a true team.”

But two years into using Slack, the company decided to abandon it altogether. As a CEO of a fully-distributed team located in over 30 countries, Salihefendic felt like he had to be constantly online. He also talked about how those who were required to do deep work—engineers, writers, and designers—found it challenging to do their best work while monitoring a chatroom all day long.

Yet when he looked at what Slack’s competitors had to offer, he realized that none of them had the capacity to provide asynchronous communication. He, along with his team, thought long and hard about what it would mean for them to build their own tools

They chose to do it anyway.

But as soon as they decided to build a new tool, which they called Twist, their north star objective became about “creating the most useful product, where people do their job effectively and unplug when it’s done

Salihefendic realized that he has to strike a balance between asynchronous and real-time communication. Today, Salihefendic estimates that 70% of Doist’s communication takes place asynchronously. The only instances where they still use real-time communication include one-on-one feedback, discussing urgent matters, and physical ‘team-bonding’ activities that take place a few times a year.