After years and years in Slack workplaces, I’m now witnessing firsthand how Teams can effectively throw sand in the gears of remote work, simply due to how its UI is designed. The lack of basic normal-ass chat rooms in a “team” pushes everything into 1-1 chats and chats attached to meetings. It kills serendipity, splits attention in unhelpful ways, and, thanks to the astonishing bad idea of how they crammed a threaded model—and only a threaded model—into a single-channel chat interface for Teams chats, makes those feel disorganized and high-friction. It’s like the tool was deliberately designed to create ad-hoc, hidden silos.
A simple choice of tool can make a big difference in the effectiveness of remote workers. Business processes and such can have just as big an effect. A lot of that stuff improves in-person work, too (that Teams horse-shit isn’t better for in-office workers, either) so adjustments to improve remote work tend not to even be trade-offs.