Let's talk about tone first.
All of your communication should be courteous, empathetic, and honest. We're entirely opposed to the "it's ok to be mean if you're right" philosophy that many companies harbor.
It's possible to disagree strongly or deliver bad news to someone while still being nice. You'll know you're on the wrong side of the line if someone is upset at your communication and you say (or think) something like "it's the truth" or "you know I'm right". Courtesy and correctness are orthogonal.
Likewise, "I didn't say anything because I didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings" will not be viewed favorably. We're counting on you to share your perspective.
If you'd like help communicating your thoughts, please ask a senior Behaviornaut. They'll be happy to help you.
Most of your communication should be in writing. We believe communicating in writing has many long term benefits for the company, including
- Time for you to consider your words
- Time for you to find and cite helpful sources
- Time for others to consider their response
- Easy historical reference
Most of your communication should be internally public. That doesn't necessarily mean that everyone should get a push notification for all your communication, but almost anyone in the company should be able to look up almost any thing anyone has talked about. That makes it easy for others to cite and build on your past work.
Our communication is designed around giving everyone at Expected Behavior maximum flexibility.
Always choose the most asynchronous, most permanent medium that will get the job done on time. Avoid becoming overly dependent on communication styles that emphasize your co-workers being in a particular place or working at a particular time.
Here's a breakdown roughly using the Eisenhower Matrix
Important and Urgent communication that requires action in the next one or two business days should be done face to face. Failing that, a zoom call. Failing that, a phone call. Failing that, a text message. You are responsible for making sure that everyone that needs to receive this communication acknowledges receipt. This should be very, very, very rare. Consider this if
- one of our products is down when it should not be down and you need help to fix it
- you're in charge of coordinating a goof off event and have to change the plan on the day of the event
- a meteor will strike the Earth shortly
- you are currently on fire (do not be this person)
All other Important Communication should go in Basecamp. This should be the overwhelming majority of your communication. Basecamp is the only place everyone in the company is required to check and stay up to date on. If you put something in Basecamp and notify the people that need to know, it is now their responsibility to read it. On average, please check Basecamp at least once per day and try to optimize for responding to messages that are waiting on you. It's ok to check Basecamp only once a day. It's ok to go more than a day without checking Basecamp as long as you're mindful of blocking others. This is a good choice for
- project updates
- keeping track of the things you need to do
- describing a non-trivial idea to the company
- having a conversation that can't be easily completed in a few minutes
- anything someone else at the company must know
- a meteor that will strike the Earth some time next week
Unimportant Communication can go in Slack. Semi-real time communication like Slack can be helpful when many people are working at the same time.
It's expected that you'll be in Slack a lot of the time when you're working, but there may be reasons you're not. It's ok to turn Slack off to reduce distraction if you need to focus. Just be mindful of the needs of others to communicate with you about work. It's also ok to go on vacation and never read any of the messages you missed. Everything in Slack should be transient ("I'm doing some testing on server1 for the next hour") or optional ("Here's a picture of a duckling watching a baby rabbit eat a carrot").
Rarely, you may feel the need to straddle the line between Important and real time. You can solve that by posting to Basecamp and putting a link to your post in Slack. Please try to avoid wuphfing people. Slack is a good choice for
- letting people know you're deploying or otherwise doing stuff that could be relevant to other people working at that same time as you (transient)
- sharing links to funny or interesting things on the internet (any channel)
- sharing links to sad or angry thing on the internet (probably the politics channel, more below)
- letting people know about your schedule for the day (e.g. if you normally come into the office on Monday, but your car broke down so you'll be working from the shop until it is fixed)
- coming up with new post apocalyptic communication jokes with other Behaviornauts
Two things here.
First, never write a message when you're having negative feelings about the thing you're talking about. If you're failing because you or someone else is having negative feelings about the topic/words/whatever, please abandon writing and talk as synchronously as possible. Written communication is great, but it's leaves a lot of nuance on the table. Sometimes we need facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, and real time feedback to get on the same page. We've been doing a written-first culture for a long time. Pushing through negative feelings to write a message almost always makes the situation worse instead of better. If you're at that point, either go to the person or write a message saying "I'd like to talk about this in person". You don't have to say more than that. Everyone, including you, will know what it means and respect it.
Second, get a buddy! Asking for review of the written word is extremely common at Expected Behavior. You can get help by
- asking the person next to you
- saving your Basecamp post as a draft and sending the link to someone with a request for review (simple things or quick reviews)
- putting it in a Google Doc and sending it to someone for review (complex things where you may want many detailed suggestions or comments)
Never. I mean it. For the love of science, please don't make any more channels. According to Slack analytics, we average 3 messages per channel per day across the ones we already have and use (excluding channels we have with zero messages in the past 30 days). Our busiest channel boasts a whopping 12 messages per day. We have almost twice as many channels as we have people. It's just not necessary. Do not want.
Most of the channels are easy to figure out, so I'll just cover a few.
Secret Chat is the catch all channel. If you're not sure where to put something, you can put it in here. As long as it's not political. Please put that in the politics channel.
The War Room is used only during an ongoing incident. Typing in that room means you think there's a Serious Problem™ right now. If you have things to add to an incident that is no longer in progress, copy a link from the War Room thread and continue the conversation in the relevant product channel.
The politics channel is probably the most important to understand. It is the place to talk about things that are controversial and unrelated to work. All conversations about or relating to politics or the culture war must go in the politics channel. A good rule of thumb is your source. If it is from a news organization or about a topic that major news organizations are covering or regularly cover, it probably belongs in politics. Some things can straddle the line. For example an article titled "World Famous Restaurant Switches To All-Meat Menu To Stick It To The Liberals" is about food and also about politics. That means it belongs in politics, not in the food channel.
Some people prefer to not discuss controversial topics at work.
If you would prefer not to discuss politics, please ignore the politics channel. It's an entirely optional experience for people who want to participate. Do not feel obligated or pressured. The politics channel exists because politics is a part of life and some people want to express that part of life with their coworkers.
If you choose to participate, you may be exposed to ideas or positions you strongly disagree with. It is ok to disagree and provide constructive counterarguments. It is ok to criticize ideas (e.g. "that will have disastrous results"). It is not a good idea to criticize people (e.g. "anyone that believes that is an idiot"). It's easy to become hyperbolic about controversial topics. I caution you to consider that you may not always know what your coworkers believe and nobody has ever been insulted into changing their beliefs. If you attack and trivialize your coworkers' deeply held beliefs today, you still have to work with them tomorrow.
No, we've tried that and it's bad. It forces a mix of important/unimportant and synchronous/asynchronous communication through the same notification channel that makes it hard to be a good participant in the company without wasting time.
The only reason to email anyone at Expected Behavior is if you're forwarding them an email from someone outside the company. Even then, consider just using Basecamp's email forwarding feature. Do not start internal-only email conversations.
You can use Hey as your email tool to waste even less time on email.
We try not to have meetings, but sometimes it's the best choice. If you need to have a meeting, here's a guide to making it as productive as possible
- Don't do it.
- Ok, you really have to. That happens.
- Make an agenda that has clear objectives.
- Invite only the people for whom that agenda is immediately valuable. If you invite 2 marketers and 2 engineers to a meeting and spend half the meeting talking nitty gritty development, you've wasted the time of two people.
- Share the agenda with those people before the meeting so they're bought into what you're trying to accomplish.
- Schedule the meeting for a length of time you think represents a good investment for the people you've invited.
- There are no meetings before lunch at Expected Behavior. It has too great an impact on flexibility.
- Lunch meetings start at 12:30.
- If you schedule a meeting during lunch time, you're in charge of making sure food is provided.
- Use the agenda clearly during the meeting.
- Avoid expanding the agenda (or letting others expand it) during the meeting. Surprise topics are frequently unproductive. It's easy to get time with people at EB. Just schedule another one.
- End the meeting when you get to the bottom of the agenda or you hit your scheduled time limit, whichever is sooner.
Here are some words and phrases we use that others don't or have special meaning to us
- Behaviornauts: What we call ourselves when we need a collective noun.
- Lunch Train: All Behaviornauts eating out for lunch typically go together on a lunch train. It coordinates in the Slack food channel and departs daily at 12:30. People that want to eat lunch with their coworkers plan around that being the time of departure. They will be sad if you leave without them. If you're going to be a little late, say something in channel and people will try to work it out with you.
- The Scale™: We generally ask for opinions on a -5 to 5 scale, known officially as The Scale™. This format allows for the clear expression of positive, negative, and neutral opinions without needing additional qualifying words. The Scale™ only officially supports integer values, but rating things is hard so there are a variety of shenanigans.
- Reasonable or 🉑: In the far past, reasonable was the highest form of praise you could receive at Expected Behavior. 🉑 is the emoji for acceptable. It’s used as a synonym for reasonable because there’s no emoji for reasonable. We've evolved a more verbally affirmative culture, but you'll still see these words pretty often.
- [ironic statement].....Expected Behavior: Once upon a time, we tried to come up with a company slogan. Now, any ironic statement can be suggested as the company slogan. Here’s an example.
- Situational Irony: A mythical sister company to Expected Behavior. It’s the holding company for all of the excellent business ideas we come up with that we cannot or will not pursue for various legal, moral, or ethical reasons.
- The Fort or Fort Behavior: Our old office in a subdivision home. It had some pros and cons.
- The Bunker: The current office, so named because it’s a fort that’s underground.
Look in the employee directory to find someone's phone number, address, or get reminded their pet's names. To add in your info, just duplicate an existing tab and complete.