For the majority of my professional life, work communication has always been a combination of email + chat. (Another long list of tools also exist, like video calls, docs, designs, project management, etc; but they are at least one order of magnitude less frequent than text based communication tools like email and chat, so won’t be a focus of this article.)
Email + Chat
My first job was in Microsoft in 2003, and the email service was provided by Microsoft Outlook. My team was in the MSN org, and therefore our primary chat tool was MSN Messenger. Now thinking back, I realize we didn’t differentiate between work and personal chats back then. They were all mixed together.
Then I joined Google in 2006. Email was Gmail, which was and still is superior to Microsoft Outlook. The chat tool went through so many different generations, and I lost count of their names too. (There is a running joke in the industry that Google just keeps trying and failing at making chat tools, but I digress.)
10 years later, I left Google and entered the startup world. Gmail + Slack was and continues to be the dominant combination.
After I sold my startup to Facebook/Meta, I re-entered the big tech corp, and here the combination is Microsoft Outlook for email and Meta Workplace for chat. Both of these deserve more explanations.
When Facebook first started, it used Gmail for email just like the majority of startup companies. Then Google announced the plan to develop Google+ in 2010/2011-ish, and Facebook was so upset that it switched from Gmail to Microsoft Outlook.
Meta Workplace Chat is actually a very decent product. It just suffered a significant lack of attention from company leadership for a long time, and the plug was eventually pulled earlier this year to shut down externally, and only keep it for internal use.
Now I’m back in the startup world, I’m back in the Gmail + Slack combination, which is, no surprise, my preferred combination.
Email vs. Chat
All the history above is only the teaser. The real discussion point today is the difference between email and chat. Both are text-heavy communication tools, and both are important, but there are some interesting differences.
Different companies have different focuses
Google is an email-first company. Employees spend a huge portion of their time reading / writing emails. Chat is secondary to email.
Mailing lists are critical in such environments, since discussions happen over emails. So each team needs at least one mailing list so that they can have discussions (more often than not, they will have multiple mailing lists, each for slightly different purposes.) I remember Google once announced “there are more mailing lists than employees”.
One funny outcome of this mailing list frenzy is the situation when a person gets subscribed to a mailing list, and doesn’t care about the topic, but couldn’t figure out how to unsubscribe, since it’s very likely it’s a mailing list A that the person actually cares about gets subscribed to a mailing list B the person doesn’t care about, but the person also can’t just unsubscribe the entire mailing list A from mailing list B. What happens often is the person who’s so upset about being spammed will reply all and say “unsubscribe me”, while spamming everyone on mailing list B. And that normally triggers a huge flood of reply-alls for more “unsubscribe me too”. (But no one actually is being unsubscribed by doing so. Irony.)
Meta is a chat-first company. Employees spend a huge portion of their time reading / writing chats. Email is far secondary to chat.
Let me explain more. It is a legit excuse for a Meta employee to say “I don’t read emails” if you ask them “what’s your opinion about the question I asked in my email last week?”.
At Meta, if something is important, the announcement is in a Workplace post, and then people repeat it in various group chats.
Google and Meta might be extremes. Most companies I’ve seen have a healthy balance between emails and chats.
Email and chat are suited for different needs
Chat is for timely discussions, which is indeed the majority of work communication. A bursty round of back-n-forth in a few minutes can clarify a lot of things, and unblock people from moving forward. This is why chat is super important.
But chat is not a good tool for lengthy articulation of complex thoughts. Many people probably have seen the “<the other person> is typing…” message in most of the chat tools. If that message stays there for longer than a few seconds, you start to wonder what the other person is trying to type, and anxiety shoots up - “I don’t know what it is, but this can’t be good”.
For the person who’s typing the long message in chat, it also wasn’t a good experience. While thought is developing, you might figure out a better way of organizing the thoughts, and need to adjust some of the early points typed up earlier. But it’s hard to do that in chat UI.
After you type up a long message in chat, make it perfect and send it out, suddenly you experience silence from everyone else in the chat group. That’s because it’s a long message and it has complex thought, and each person needs to take time to read and to think. Now it’s the message sender’s turn to have anxiety. “What do people think about this idea? Why am I not getting any responses?”
Email (or doc) is much better suited for such lengthy articulation of complex thoughts. Take time to draft it, adjust how to present it, polish it. Afterwards leverage chats for quick discussions and clarifications of the email (or doc) content. That’s the best combination.
Access control
Email and chat also have different access control implications.
Emails can be easily forwarded. That’s a double-edged sword. On the positive side, easily forwarding an email relieves the reader from the risk of accidentally misrepresenting the author when paraphrasing. On the negative side, confidentiality is nearly impossible to achieve in emails.
Chat provides a slightly higher level of confidentiality, since it needs copy-n-paste or screenshot to share beyond the original audience, and it has more friction. On the down side, chat tends to raise a lot more “he says, she says” type of communication challenges.
Authenticity
Another key observation I want to point out here is email and chat provide different levels of authenticity in communication.
Emails tend to be more formal and more polished; chats tend to be more informal, and in fact quite common to be completely lowercase, without proper spelling and punctuation.
This allows people to both act and be perceived as more authentic over chat, and this is a huge factor in building trust relationships in the work environment.
Generational shift
One last point, I’ve noticed that younger generations tend not to have the habit of reading emails. It will be interesting to see how this changes the work culture going forward.
Thanks for sharing! In my experience, another differentiation between the two is the SLA in reply. I tend to reply to chats within 1 hour and reply to emails within the same day. I see people have similar expectations at work. Before Slack introduced "schedule message", I heavily relied on Gmail's schedule send to the next morning and to avoid bugging others outside business hours.