Summary

Group chat can become a unproductive and toxic tool if we don’t use it effectively.

• Brainstorming sessions on group chat often lead to shallow ideas, tangential discussions, and difficulty in following the conversation.

• Task management suffers when group chat replaces transparent task boards, resulting in skewed priorities and loss of team alignment.

• Giving feedback through group chat can lead to unproductive criticism and a negative impact on morale.

• Instead of the above behaviours, try the following alternatives.

  • Encourage long-form, asynchronous communication and use task boards to promote transparency and shared understanding.

  • Provide feedback privately and respectfully. This promotes a positive work environment and improves the quality of feedback.

  • Recognise the limitations of group chat and implement thoughtful communication practices. It’ll help you build more focused, inclusive, and productive teams.

I have a love-hate relationship with group chat. Sure, it's handy for quick back-and-forths and sharing simple info, but when it comes to more important stuff, it can be a distraction and a waste of time. In fact, there are certain activities where it's even toxic. So, let's dig into why group chat might not be the best choice for brainstorming, task management, and giving feedback. We'll explore some alternatives that can help us collaborate better and avoid the downsides of group chat.

If writing solidifies, chat dissolves

Think about this pattern. You have a thought in your head. It’s fresh. You don’t just want to share it with your colleagues, you also want to enrich it with their thoughts. And so, you throw it in to chat. “Thoughts people?”, you say. In a world where the marketing of instant messaging tools represents reality, your message leads to a snowball of intellectual contribution. Not only do you refine your thoughts, but you enrich them with those from other people. Right? No, let’s snap back to reality.

More often than not, “brainstorming” of this nature on chat, is even worse than brainstorming in a meeting. If you’ve tried this and have the scar tissue to show for the experience, then you’ve had one or many of the following experiences.

• Since you haven’t explained your idea sufficiently, people assume that detail and give irrelevant comments.

• Even if you’ve explained your idea, people’s ideas are shallow, because hey! Chat is a short-form medium.

• Someone derails the conversation by talking about a tangential topic.

• After some time, the thread becomes impossible to follow, because you don’t know the context of what people are referring to in their messages. You scroll up and down to search for that context. Sometimes you succeed. Many times you fail.

• The chat becomes an all-day meeting, with people dropping in and dropping out of it. But they’re also emotionally invested in the conversation, so they keep it open in a tab on the side, to check in from time to time. The casualty is deep work. 

• A few days later when you want to find the chat conversation, you struggle. There’ve been dozens of other such conversations. Getting back to that thread is a pain in the wrong place.

Sounds familiar? That’s why chat, regardless of how sophisticated the tool, is the worst place for ideation. It’s shallow, it’s distracting, it’s unfocussed, and it’s hard to keep track of unless you make it a big part of your job. There are better ways to ideate.

On this site, we’ve talked about writing things up. Even when you’re seeking other people’s opinions, you inevitably have opinions of your own. Slow down. Prioritise depth over speed. Write your thoughts clearly in a document. Share it with people and invite comments. When people can give you feedback and suggestions on specific parts of your document, you’ll see that the inputs are much richer than the generic, off-the-cuff comments you get in chat.

If the task board aligns, chat deviates

For any distributed team, the task board must be the hub of all activity. It’s the only transparent way to know in real time what the team is doing. Without this transparency, you have the annoyance of project manager types going around, nagging everyone for manual status updates. It’s the thing neither the manager nor their team enjoys.

Chat is the arch-enemy of this discipline. If your team doesn’t recognise the task board as its nerve centre, then a few things happen.

• You live in the here and now. After all, if you don’t have a view of all the work you must do, you can’t prioritise between tasks. You suffer from recency bias and the most recent work you learn of, becomes the most important.

• As soon as you learn about this piece of seemingly important work, you communicate about it on chat. While you’re at it, why not problem-solve as well? Before you know it, you’ve derailed a bunch of people to focus on something that should have never been a priority.

• With enough of such behaviours, the task board loses its relevance. “Updating” Jira, Asana, or Trello becomes a side task you do only to keep the managers happy. And regardless of these “updates”, you never can tell what the team is up to.

You don’t want to be in the situation I described. Don’t normalise this way of working. Avoid the hyperactive hive mind. Be sure that all your work originates on your task board. You must know the relative priorities and dependencies across different pieces of work before you pick something up. When you pick up a piece of work, you must task it out. It should be clear that you will own it to completion. People should know how long it’ll take you to complete the work. All conversations related to the work must sit in the context of the card that describes the work. This is how you build collective understanding. That, unfortunately, isn’t a feature of chat.

Feedback helps you grow, but feedback on group chat is deflating

My colleague Naji has written earlier about how to exchange feedback asynchronously. The first point in each of those articles addresses the notion of safety. There are two aspects to this - the people and the environment. First, both the giver and the receiver of feedback must trust each other’s intentions. And second, they must be able to exchange feedback in what they consider a “safe space”. 

Now different people can have different notions of safety, but we’ll agree that if we were working in an office, most reasonable people wouldn’t share constructive feedback in a public place. As Vince Lombardi famously said, “Praise in public, criticise in private”. That said, some of us forget this advice when on group chat. In the name of “open feedback” and “troubleshooting”, we’re collectively unkind to our colleagues by giving them shallow comments about their work, using group chat as a medium. Inevitably, one shallow comment builds on another, resulting in a barrage of unproductive criticism. 

Spare a thought for the person whose work you’re commenting on. By creating this Twitter-like space at work, you may create a long-term, negative impact on their morale. Don’t let remote work be an excuse to avoid basic common sense and courtesies. If you have feedback, share it in a safe, private setting. Not only will this help you avoid groupthink, but you’ll also get to seek the other person’s perspective. The safer the person receiving feedback feels, the more keen they’ll be, when seeking feedback the next time around. 

Not that you can’t share feedback on chat. Do it in a private chat if that’s the most accessible medium available to you. That said, keep a few fundamentals in mind.

1. Structure your thoughts. Be specific about what you’ve observed and what impact you’re experiencing from that observation.

2. Share an alternative. If you believe that the other person can do something differently, share that suggestion up front.

3. Be open to another point of view. Ask the other person what they think. If they share a counterview or an alternative that makes sense, don’t be adamant about your suggestions. Be hard on the problem, and easy on your coworker.

4. Don’t go on forever. If sharing feedback on direct messaging takes over five back-and-forth messages, you’re better off getting into a meeting. It’ll be more efficient, and you’ll find it easier to build a connection using your tone of voice, body language and facial expressions. 

The promise of group chat is seductive. It feels like an easy way to connect with the entire team and speak to everyone in one shot. That’s the marketing spiel, isn’t it? In truth, there are just as many ways to misuse chat as there are to use it effectively. Our generation’s tryst with social media has taught us many bad habits. Those habits make it easier to misuse instant messaging than to use it constructively. 

When it comes to effective collaboration, we must be thoughtful about the tools we use. Group chat is no exception. Recognise its limitations and be mindful of its downsides so you make better choices about communicating and collaborating with your team. Prioritise asynchronous, long form communication, use task boards for transparency, and give feedback in a respectful and private manner. By taking these steps, we can steer clear of shallow communication and constant distractions. The result - focused work, enhanced thinking, and inclusive collaboration. Isn’t that what we all want?