How we communicate
37signals.com
37signals.com
In the following weeks 1/3 of their employees left as a direct result of this.
I lived in Chicago at the time and other companies scooped those jumping ship up really quick. https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/4/22419512/basecamp-politica...
They were on the verge of mutiny, and they managed to stop it just in time.
1/3 of the company actually quit because they were discouraged from talking about biden/trump/jan 6/etc on slack? If that were happening I could see why a ban would be beneficial. That sh*t's distracting and there's never a winning side to the argument.
I mean it's supposed to be a company, not a political cult.
Edit: After more reading, sounds like the policy was sparked by an employee reviving threads about Basecamp's diversity, inclusion, etc.
Company leadership deciding that political discussion/debate is too distracting to go in the remote team's official communication platform seems totally reasonable. They didn't say you can't talk about it with anyone at all, they just said don't do it in the chat rooms that are used by everyone at the company.
I'm not sure when the norm changed but it had to be very recent, I've never worked in a place where it was acceptable to debate politics in a company-wide platform.
Obviously, corporations have zero incentive to improve the society as a whole, it's easier to just tell everyone either they get along or they're fired.
So I smile and wave towards everyone. They'll never know I'm whatever-ist, and I silently vote for politicians that take away rights of certain social groups I'm prejudiced about.
> Around 2009, Basecamp customer service representatives began keeping a list of names that they found funny. More than a decade later, current employees were so mortified by the practice that none of them would give me a single example of a name on the list. One invoked the sorts of names Bart Simpson used to use when prank calling Moe the Bartender: Amanda Hugginkiss, Seymour Butz, Mike Rotch.
> Many of the names were of American or European origin. But others were Asian, or African, and eventually the list — titled “Best Names Ever” — began to make people uncomfortable. What once had felt like an innocent way to blow off steam, amid the ongoing cultural reckoning over speech and corporate responsibility, increasingly looked inappropriate, and often racist.
> Discussion about the list and how the company ought to hold itself accountable for creating it led directly to CEO Jason Fried announcing Tuesday that Basecamp would ban employees from holding “societal and political discussions” on the company’s internal chat forums. The move, which has sparked widespread discussion in Silicon Valley, follows a similar move from cryptocurrency company Coinbase last year.
As other employees said-
> Employees say the founders’ memos unfairly depicted their workplace as being riven by partisan politics, when in fact the main source of the discussion had always been Basecamp itself.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...
Trying to act like this was simply a "no politics" rule, when it was actually a "don't criticize the leaders of our company" rule, show they either weren't paying attention to this when it happened or that have an agenda to push.
It was handed down by public announcement with zero discussion or warning.
If my boss pulled nonsense like that I would consider quitting too.
I also heard that they offered very generous severance packages(6 months salary), so there may have been other factors contributing to the exodus.
> You can not not communicate.
It's "cannot not".
“Both cannot and can not are perfectly fine, but cannot is far more common” [1]
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/cannot-vs-can-not-is...
Making every employee publicly confess how much they got done today sounds like a very toxic and nannying work environment.
Basecamp isn’t necessary though, Github discussions is a very decent answer for forums and discussions. It feels like things that go on in discussions are much more permanent and searchable, and can be tied to tickets, etc
> [...]
> we got rid of slack
Seems like the opposite of what you wanted? There's nothing more realtime about Slack than email, and it offers a better interface.
> Write at the right time. Sharing something at 5pm may keep someone at work longer. You may have some spare time on a Sunday afternoon to write something, but putting it out there on Sunday may pull people back into work on the weekends. Early Monday morning communication may be buried by other things. There may not be a perfect time, but there’s certainly a wrong time. Keep that in mind when you hit send.
Guideline 15 states:
> Communication shouldn’t require schedule synchronization. Calendars have nothing to do with communication. Writing, rather than speaking or meeting, is independent of schedule and far more direct.
Guideline 9 states:
>"Never expect or require someone to get back to you immediately unless it’s a true emergency. The expectation of immediate response is toxic."
When you embrace asynchronous communication and you expect people to manage their own time, you should be empowered to send a note at any time because recipients should have the maturity to manage when they read. If something is truly urgent, the sender will find a way to reach you (e.g. phone), but those cases are very rare indeed so not worth having a process for.
If they are peers, then yes, send whenever.
If the sender is in a hierarchy above the recipient, then the mere fact that they are communicating with them inherently includes that hierarchy and places pressure upon the recipient.
You can trust the recipient to be mature and manage when they read, as much as they can trust you to be mature and not fire them for failing to reply.
What I have found is that power dynamics also come from other dimensions that are not encoded in official company hierarchy but more about social hierarchy. They can also be implicit amongst peers, such as someone with more tenure than someone with less. Or personal traits such as being outgoing vs. more shy. I'm sure there are many that are informed through one's culture, background, etc.
If you have a geographically distributed company, then picking the "perfect time" can get very awkward.
Maybe the solution out of this is that they can collapse the set of guidelines into fewer principles that are centered around themes, such as: "audience", "clarity", "modes", etc. and focusing on desirable outcomes, rather than prescriptive implementation details.
Maybe. On the other hand, I would rewrite these 30 guidelines into a more condensed set of themes that describe desired outcomes rather than implementation details. That would leave much more breathing room for not only context and nuance, but also future cases that were not specifically envisioned in the original set.
This may work with a well functioning team and organization where everyone has basic literacy skills, but I suspect every big co is similar.
I may make the same grammar and orthography mistakes, but at least there is not an additional pronunciation challenge.
But I do consider myself fluent in English (even if far from perfect). I don’t know if that would still be true to someone not fluent in English
One of my language teachers said babies learn listening first, then speaking, then reading and finally writing, whereas adults it is the other way around: adults find it easiest to deal with writing because they control the context and it is in their own time, then reading because although there might be unexpected constructions, it is again in their own time. Then speaking for the same reason as writing, except timing is more real time, and finally listening is the hardest challenge, because it requires real time understanding of the context.
So I agree that I would expect written communication to be easier to deal with for many non natives of any language.
In my experience written communication worked a lot better when people were not at ease with the subject or the language, as you could do it asynchronously and they could edit themselves easily.
Meetings had an incredible amount of back and forth with ton of whiteboarding and people only reacting after we'd come to a conclusion that we rewrite in plain words. It's still a pain to do that in written form, but each side isn't stuck in meetings for 5 hours at least.
Otherwise, yes, in that case there's just no way around voice communication.
If they can't speak fluent English, then long-form messages are beside the point; they're beyond the reach of either Slack or face-to-face meetings. I've never worked for a firm in which a significant part of the staff were functionally illiterate, I'm glad to say.
> I suspect every big co is similar
That doesn't gel with my experince.
We don’t do it in my current job and it means; weeks or months of someone being on the same task.
While I agree that people can be irresponsible, I'd say this reveals more about the manager than the IC. The manager is responsible for tracking everyone's workload and with a project management software, you can get a quick overview without daily status update. Some tasks can take days of research and it gets annoying quickly to recapitulate what you've been doing, especially if you've done so already elsewhere. And some days, you're less productive than usual, but that may be the calm period needed to get a solution.
This policy minimizes or even forgets the human part of communication... * How do I build trust in my coworkers if the only feedback I get is formal communication and never the nuance of them as people? * Are a barrage of async essays better than fewer but efficient meetings where everyone takes away value? * What about the flood of async communication that employees now have to sift through to find the vital parts of their jobs?
We need to remember that fundamentally that we are people and have social drives that guide our lives and work. Strategies should acknowledge and embrace this.
PS. That "automated" social message sounds forced and robotic. I would love to be a fly on the wall and see the actual results from this form of social greasing after 6 months.
Their main communication tool is Basecamp, which is also the software they sell specifically to manage projects and the “flood of async communication”. I don’t know what their internal messages look like, but I imagine it sits somewhere in between e-mail and IM, same level of formality as a github issue.
I also believe “fewer and efficient meetings” is a mirage, and meetings, even in-person ones, do very little to build trust or satisfy that need for social interaction. That happens in other ways.
Here’s an interview where they talk specifically about the importance of social meetups: https://37signals.com/podcast/company-meet-up-amsterdam-edit...
Bah. I wouldn't say I like this approach, since it's based on the assumption (wrong in my opinion) that using a tool or a set of rules to enforce social communication, will solve the socialization problem.
Do you want to talk about a book? Talk about it.
Would you like to know your new remote colleague? Book a call with her.
And so on, on a list of examples that I'd like to sum up in this sentence:
if you want to socialize, just socialize, since no tool can do that for you.
----
Then, I'm quite in line with this comment from @nmat
> Face-to-face communication is very underrated nowadays, probably because of the negative connotations associated with meetings. Talking to someone is by far the fastest way to convey information. I often prefer a quick chat to spend 30 minutes writing Slack messages back and forth. I agree that writing has other benefits and it's better in certain cases but we need to get out of the mindset that writing/async is always better.
A direct, face-to-face conversation is usually way faster than a ping-pong chat on Slack or, worse, especially for day-to-day activities.
On the same line of thinking, instead of long, useless meetings, or writing pedantic, bureaucratic, asynchronous long forms (like the 30 bullet points of the article), I'm a big proponent of pair/mob activities within small teams:
Use a visual collaboration tool, a shared document, or a code editor, and write together!
Utilize a timer and change the driver often.
Keep people focused and work together.
I've never seen teams be as efficient and fast as the ones adopting this approach.
Finally, the principle that I like most of the Agile Manifesto, the most important one to me:
> Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
You have both missed the point; you shouldn’t be having ping-pong chats in any medium. If you have some thoughts, write them up properly.
I fully agree with that, but I also understand this communication style won't work for everyone, some people are bad at writing or just more confident when talking, I think those are not a good fit for remote-first companies.
You can not not communicate. Not discussing the elephant in the room is communicating. Few things are as important to study, practice, and perfect as clear communication.
I wonder if a meaningful gaze or avoiding eye contact would be better when not discussing the elephant.
> The expectation of immediate response is toxic.
Flippantly referring to things as "toxic" is pretty "toxic" IMO. It can easily be interpreted as quite a personal attack rather than a criticism of a temporary action (see point 8)
This one sounds profound, and in practice feels completely wrong.
Rushed conversations happen because of tight deadline. Find me a way to get rid of the deadline, and the communication will grow smoother.
Those who need to know what I've been working on will have access to the project management tools where my progress is official reported. I won't report it twice, and I absolutely will not report it in a broadcast to the entire company.
Casual verbal communication is often the lubrication that keeps organizations working well.
I think you’re probably right, but I think the point of these guidelines is, in part, to reduce or eliminate the need for political nous.
This is, in my opinion, important for building a meritocratic environment; you want people who are good at adding value to be rewarded, not those good at office politics.
[for context - https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...]
A few of the bullets in this blog post absolutely had to come from lessons of the early 2021 controversies. Picking the right venue to share communication, for example.
They were driven by idealism before 2021. That's what got them in the mess they got in. They let people talk politics in work channels. This led to division. Then they went very public with their new policy of no politics at work. Both were unnecessary blunders that came from idealism - A belief in open communication for all at all times.
They don't do that any more. Their messaging is much more focused now.
Meanwhile their number of employees is counted in the low dozens, where communication is typically pretty easy for a company.
Yet they got that spectacularly wrong also: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...
Basically, what was so egregious about the complaint that people shouldn’t listen to him? I didn’t see it, so maybe there’s some context I’m missing.
his hobby is driving supercars and he was praising garbage men on his blog because they can’t take time off for their mental health
All seems a bit cult-leader ish to me. Does anyone actually take this stuff seriously?
(~10 years remote)
It's only afterwards that it comes back to bite both sides.
Really depends on how the conversation is handled/going. I recently had a feedback from two people having a face to face meeting. One week later they followed up and they found out they completely misunderstood what they had said to each other.