The best human design and use of communication technologies at work is based on the principle that technology is not sociology. Technology doesn't make connection and collaboration happen. People do that. Giving technology more power than it has is the shortest distance to a communication weak culture.
Breaking up with Slack
In Slack, I'm Breaking Up With You, Samuel Hulick pens a personal farewell letter to Slack, citing a string of disappointed expectations, mostly time management focused.
His points are certainly genuine and valid however the most important aspect of his perspective is how we expect technology to completely remove the need for social agreement in how we use these technologies. Our disappointment in the way technologies help or hurt us needs to be understood in the context that what makes them work is not there design but our agreements and how we will use them together.
We need to agree on simple specific things like how often we're expected to visit and respond within these technologies as a team. We need to agree on when and how we use them and when we don't and instead use other media to accomplish our communication and coordination and knowledge sharing. It's in these agreements that make the technology work for us rather than the frustration of feeling like working for the technology.
Tech rollouts
It's easy to have an intention to roll out new technology to teams. In our case we have no hesitation to highly recommending technology apps like Trello, Slack and Google drive.
Like any kind of change and innovation the biggest obstacle we face is the force of habit. People are used to emails and useless meetings and reports. That's their comfort zone. What it takes to move them towards new technologies is going one step at a time aiming for progress rather than for the perfection of goal achievement.
Even when early adoptors are willing and interested in doing more, we can start by moving just one kind of email or conversation or meeting into any of these environments. Even just one transition and migration exposes most people to most of the functions they're going to use the scale into full use of all three.
Parallel to this whole effort of helping people see the benefits and unique advantages of doing so. The last thing we can do is realistically assume that people will understand immediately what the transition is about before we make it clear to them. It is also significant to involve them every step along the way in how the transition occurs.