What’s better than slack? These companies have some ideas.

“I definitely have an addictive personality,” says Kane, 29. Slack, with its characteristic mix of nonstop play, GIFs, updates on serious work projects and small talk, dominated his life. “It was so tempting to be there all the time,” she says.

She transitioned from intern to full-time marketer in 2015, and the messages kept coming – until 2016. That was when her company left Slack. Her workday has improved dramatically, she says. Currently, she usually connects to Doist’s internal message board in the morning to check for project updates, disconnects and writes and edits until lunch with few distractions.

In the years since Slack made its debut in 2009, it has helped to consolidate instant messaging as an essential part of white collar work. But many besieged workers have found that it has replaced email, which has never been a technology so loved, with something even more disturbing.

The use of Slack and other collaboration platforms, such as Microsoft Teams and Facebook Workplace, skyrocketed during the pandemic. From January to April 2020, the average time that Slack users remained active on the platform jumped to around 120 minutes a day, from around 85 minutes, according to their latest earnings report. (The Wall Street Journal is a Slack customer.) Microsoft Teams found a 72% increase in instant messaging in March 2020, compared to a baseline from January to February 2020.

Still, some companies are retreating from the constant chat trend, reducing, or even eliminating, the expectation of having live chats and calls on a normal workday. There are simply too many messages.

The buzzword for the new form of communication in these workplaces is asynchronous. Asynchronous communication refers to chats that do not happen in real time. It can include annotated documents, posting on message threads that do not send notifications for each update, but good old-fashioned email. Synchronous communication refers to the rest: video calls, phone calls, chat apps and face-to-face conversation.

Doist, where Kane still works, created a first asynchronous culture after leaving Slack, says Gonçalo Silva, its technology director based in Portugal. The company designed its own internal communication platform called Twist, which organizes discussion topics about specific projects or topics, instead of creating comprehensive and fast channels.

Going a step further, the company also abandoned regular meetings. All lectures across the company are recorded and published online.

Asynchronous teamwork also requires some individual changes. Mrs. Kane got used to communicating deadlines well in advance. She rarely expects her 91 colleagues across 35 countries to be online at the same time.

Slack can be used asynchronously, in theory – say, if the company’s culture accommodates slow response times – but it rarely happens in practice.

The average response time for Slack users in 2020 was 16.3 minutes, according to the productivity analysis company Time is Ltd., which analyzed an anonymous dataset of 5,000 users worldwide for The Wall Street Journal. For e-mails, the average response time was 72 minutes.

Slack has several features to make notifications more manageable, notes Noah Weiss, vice president of product for the San Francisco company. This includes the option to be notified only if people mark your name and a do not disturb mode.

Slack’s main innovation in relation to email, he says, is that users can actively choose the channels most relevant to their work. He sees e-mail, on the other hand, as all kinds of information sent to employees. This is difficult to refuse, he says, barring measures like blocking senders.

A Microsoft spokesman also points out features that promote asynchronous work in teams, including the definition of “quiet times” and “quiet days” and the recording and transcription of virtual meetings.

As for the informal and social parts of Slack chats, from which many users find it especially difficult to separate, Mr. Weiss says: “We never [explicitly] focused on trying to allow better social uses of Slack, but we think it’s a good sign that we’ve built a work tool that people feel makes the workplace more humane. ”

Several companies have created their own platforms for asynchronous updates in recent years. Zapier, a company that allows users to sync web applications, has Async. Stripe, the fintech company, has Home. These platforms do not need to replace Slack completely, but they can take on some functions. Publishing updates to company policies during the pandemic on a dedicated page, for example, eliminates the need to constantly answer HR questions on a high-traffic chat channel.

Whatever your messaging platform of choice, making your workplace asynchronous first involves deliberate choices at every step, says John Meyer, CEO of Lemonly, an infographics design agency in Sioux Falls, SD, with 17 employees across three zones US times. When he decided to make his company more asynchronous a year ago, he instructed his team to write things down instead of leaving meetings by default. He also became an acolyte of Loom, a screen recording tool that allows you to record your computer screen or short videos of yourself.

“This was great for the two members of my team who went on maternity leave during the pandemic. They just finished recording videos on how to do their job for the workers who replaced them, ”he says.

Last summer, even Slack started developing an asynchronous video feature, still in pilot mode, says Weiss.

These developments aside, there are still obvious uses for real-time communication, such as personnel disputes, tense work emergencies and deadlines, not to mention hilarious short-lived observations. It is difficult to imagine a company eliminating this completely.

The key is to be careful about the limits of chat, says Nir Eyal, the author of “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life”, a resident of Singapore.

He doesn’t see communication apps as inherently problematic, but he thinks employees can be more deliberate about incorporating them into their workday. “I encourage you to put everything on a calendar, not just meetings – even the times of the day when you can check out Slack,” he says.

“Group chatting is like a hot tub,” he says. “You must come and go, not sit on it all day.”

Write to Krithika Varagur at [email protected]