Which channels should we use for what type of messaging?
In the complex and ever-so-busy corporate world, communication above anything else is a cornerstone. Every single person will deal with this aspect at least once per day – making it one of the most important and essential things to understand.
Many things go wrong when communication is not working, is lacking, or is simply just not where it’s supposed to be, and part of these issues stems from incorrect channel setup. As with any large-scale implemented structure, communication also requires a proper channel in order to achieve its goal. This is where things get a bit crazy at times, because many first-time managers (and a lot of times experienced leaders) tend to use the wrong channel, and when this happens, people get unclear messages. With so much diversity in ways to communicate nowadays, as a first-time manager, what channels for what kind of communications should we use to achieve the best result?
First-time managers should align channels with intent: use email for formal, official, and external updates; chat for quick questions, casual updates, and team banter; documentation for operating procedures and process guidelines; and meetings strictly for complex discussions and alignment. Clear rules and emergency protocols ensure clarity, eliminate clutter, and prevent communication burnout across your team.
In this article:
- Why communication gets messy, fast: most communication chaos happens simply because people use the wrong channel for the wrong message, leading to overload and notification burnout.
- The Channels: match your intent to the medium by using email for formal notices, chat for quick queries, documentation for process guidelines, and meetings for complex discussions.
- Setting the proper rules: establish clear guidelines around real urgency, expected response times, and focus hours to keep communication structured and respected.
- The Emergency Protocols: define what constitutes a true crisis and assign specific fallback channels – like phone calls or direct emails – to handle it calmly.
- Noise and Notifications: minimize daily distractions by leaving irrelevant chats and turning off unnecessary notifications to reduce stress and maintain focus.
- Putting it all into practice: document your communication rules in a cheat sheet, gently correct off-track behavior, and regularly update your guidelines as team needs evolve.
Why communication gets messy, fast!
It’s always a question with a very – apparently – complex answer, when in reality things couldn’t be less complicated. People assume the messy part comes from the complex and very intricate way humans interact with each other, trying to find mysterious patterns and “rules” for why things go wrong. Maybe in some cases it’s that, but how about trying this one: what if it’s just the wrong message in the wrong channel?
Let’s take chat for instance: everyone is using chat for everything now. To better understand why this is not something that always works for you, we need to go back to the beginning and think about why chat appeared in the first place: the need of different engineers who needed faster ways to communicate. In essence, chat is a quick way to tell someone something fast, and because of this, using it for every single communication you want to relay is a very bad idea.
I was doing an audit a few years back, and the team in question was using a Teams chat for every single thing: metrics, urgent cases, procedures, updates, and whatever else you can think of. Besides the more legally nuanced issues that might arise from dumping everything about everyone in a single chat room, imagine the amount of chaos and general confusion the people in that team had to deal with every day. How could someone even find something important in a chat?
Something that I have learned to hate – a lot – are notifications. Since 2020 or so, I feel like everything in my work (and personal life) is all about notifications. From the moment I open up chat and email at work, I immediately get flooded with tons of notifications: chats, missed replies, system updates, recaps from meetings, someone mentioning your name (or the @everyone thing that is so annoying and should be removed), and who knows what else you have left from yesterday.
All these might appear harmless, but they are not: slowly but surely, they will create notification burnout, and when that happens, people no longer treat the important ones seriously. I saw this happen many, many times, especially with corporate emails: when you get flooded with tons of corporate emails about irrelevant topics, you will most likely start to develop a sort of immunity and “lack of care,” and in time ignore them completely. Companies should be more mindful about this and start treating the subject with more interest: more is not always better!
If you want better communication in your own team, make sure you make things clear and structured: where to post and where to look. Instead of letting people continue doing what they are familiar with, start having your own rules for better communication, where you decide what channel is used for what activity. By doing this, you can create your very own simple rules on how and what people can do or say, which will also allow for more clarity when it comes to where to find whatever information you might need. Think of it as your very own library where you are the one arranging the books exactly how you want them.
The Channels
There are many ways one can go about communication, but effective communication is all about proper channel selection. For some time now, the business world – especially the corporate one – has been gravitating around the following channels: email, chat, documentation, and meetings. More or less, these four are the main pillars when it comes to communication. Understanding what each is and what it is best for is key to an effective message.
The email is now “as old as time,” with many of us growing up with this specific channel. Today, email is something that can easily become a stressor, with a lot of people using it the wrong way. The correct functionality of your email for effective communication should be: external communication, formal updates, and detailed official notices.
Sadly, most times we see it as a constant clutter generator (with companies literally spamming employees with tons of content people do not need or ask for), unending email chains with everyone in CC, people “Reply to All-ing” on every little thing, and plenty of other similar examples. All of this makes email one of the most ineffective, tiresome, and truly awful communication channels out there now.
The best way to change this is to limit its use to the things you need to be more official and/or impactful. Keep away from clutter, and when there’s something worth talking about, instead of creating a chain of 100 emails, just have a meeting.
The chat is a more “modern” addition, but most people who started working 20–30 years ago are very familiar with it, as it was part of the process way back then. When I was in training for my very first job, we were taught that chat usage is only for business-related questions, with either your direct manager or a subject matter expert – not for personal or other instances. Of course, no one actually listened to that… but it is so strange to look at a way of working from 20 years ago and think about how different things were. Today, chat is the most frequently used method, accounting for 57% of all daily incoming written communication (according to data from Microsoft’s Work Trend Index report). Because it is used so much, chat is also a huge generator of issues, with people completely mismanaging it from an effective channel point of view. Chat should be used for very quick answers or questions, casual updates, and general team banter. When people use it for official communication, talk about procedure changes, or communicate metrics or other more important business and team aspects, it transitions from a simple, quick channel into a very chaotic, messy, and unpleasant experience.
Documentation is very simple, and in my opinion, one of the better-understood channels of communication overall. I mean, if you think about it, when was the last time you saw someone using documentation for something other than its intended purpose? The main idea behind this channel is to keep all process-related data in it: standard operating procedures, work instructions, articles people might need, guidelines, project specifications, and any other process-related topic or element.
In a strange twist of events, people are not using documentation wrong; rather, when there’s an issue with this specific channel, it’s mostly because it does not exist. This is indeed a pain point when it comes to some teams and leaders: whether because they lack experience or “don’t believe in it,” they simply don’t implement the documentation part of the process. This, of course, is very bad; you simply can’t have a good working process without written guidelines and procedures.
Finally, we have meetings – something everyone who works is very familiar with. A meeting is a form of human connection where we share different aspects, talk about a specific topic, or listen to business updates. To be an effective communication channel, a meeting must be used for complex discussions, alignment, and sensitive visual feedback.
Right after 2020 and the pandemic, I noticed something very strange happening: a lot of meetings just to meet. Maybe it’s just my own view on the subject; however, before the shift to working from home, meetings had a bit of substance to them. Data from major workplace studies (such as Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, Atlassian, and academic researchers) shows that people are often meeting simply to signal presence, protect focus time, or validate their work – a phenomenon researchers and business analysts call “performative work” or “fauxductivity.”
Setting the proper rules
The best way to improve communication effectiveness is to look at the rules. People will use the correct channel for the correct message if they have a clear structure regarding what to do and when to do it.
One of the things a good leader should clarify is “fake” vs. “real” urgency. Many people effectively fake urgent matters in order to get attention or receive whatever update or approval they need. If you have a well-established structure and people understand what, when, and how things should be done, there will be no need to fake urgency. Faking urgent tasks is usually a sign that something in your process is not working as intended.
Once people understand what is actually urgent, it’s time to set up realistic expectations for response times on both chat and email. A lot of issues arise from the fact that not everyone on the team is aware of or aligned on timelines: if one person expects a chat question to be answered in 1 minute while another waits 10–20 minutes for the same thing, something is very wrong. This is why a good leader will set expectations here, explaining how response times work and how long it takes to get an answer for each type of question. If you feel a table would do a better job, go ahead and put all the different request types in one column and the expected timelines in the next.
Respecting deep-work time is also a factor a good leader should consider, especially now with so much happening remotely. This goes both ways, for both the leader and the team: when someone is deep-working (a “Do Not Disturb” status is usually a good signal for that), people should step back and respect it. I don’t know about you, but I have at least two cases a day of people trying to call me on Teams even when they see I am in another meeting or set to “Do Not Disturb.” From my point of view, a lot of us have lost our sense of boundaries: online status doesn’t seem to mean anything anymore.
The Emergency Protocols
In any well-structured team, one aspect above everything else must be crystal clear: emergency protocols.
First, the leader must explain (or decide with the team) what breaks normal operating procedure and constitutes an emergency. Things must be as clear as day here, because otherwise you risk letting anything people feel like handling right now become an “emergency.” Usually, emergencies are tied to business impact, key customers, tool issues that affect the team, major escalations, or anything else with a significant impact on an individual or the team. For this reason, it’s essential for you, the leader, to establish these parameters clearly from the start and eliminate room for interpretation.
Your next step is to establish the appropriate emergency channel people will use: is it email, chat, or phone? I look at this through a distinct lens, so I normally go with something like this:
- Email: In an emergency, this is the only channel I use to inform the client (since it can be forwarded and shared with senior stakeholders much better than a chat message).
- Chat: Used for team-related emergency aspects when something needs to be communicated to everyone very quickly.
- Phone: In case an issue happens when I am away or offline, use the phone to contact people and get things moving.
When an emergency situation arises, we need to remember one crucial rule: no panic. The more panic you generate, the more chaos you create, and the worse things get. This is why we need to be very careful when communicating about emergencies, avoiding unnecessary panic across the board.
Noise and Notifications
I am not the biggest fan of either of these aspects, but I do understand why we might occasionally need parts of them.
Noise is all about the volume of content you don’t really need that is somehow forced on you: active chats in large meetings, email chains on topics that don’t involve you, SharePoint updates and comments people keep adding, and many other examples. I don’t support this way of working at all; as such, I remove all of these distractions from my daily workflow. The best example I can give is with Teams chat: you can leave a specific conversation (such as a meeting chat pestering you with messages from 50 people), and when you leave, you can also delete the chat history to keep your workspace clean.
Notifications, on the other hand, are my biggest enemy because, honestly, I feel bombarded by them all the time: on your phone, your TV, even your vacuum cleaner… they are everywhere. Because of this, work-related notifications add more stress and pressure than people might think. Instead of serving a clear purpose (like letting you know a specific report is ready), they act as a constant trigger for the fight-or-flight response. The best advice I can give you for a better working experience is to disable as many notifications as you can.
Any channel you don’t need in your Teams or chat environment should be pushed away or removed entirely so you can focus on the ones you actually use. Don’t keep any chat that holds no actual value for you.
A good practice is to encourage people to use threads in chat to keep discussions structured. Setting up clear @channel or @here etiquette to avoid the dreaded @everyone is a great way to stay focused and avoid making everyone in the chat resent you.
Putting it all into practice
With a better understanding of the topic, it’s now time for you to piece everything together and make it work. Because it’s a long process with plenty of moving parts, a good approach is to write things down or create a cheat sheet with the rules. This way, people can look at it and see what, when, and how they need to approach different communications.
I know sometimes it feels excessive when I talk about these things and recommend setting up procedures left and right, but if there is one thing I have learned in 20 years of management, it is this: without clear rules and structure, no matter how good of a manager you are, things will always fall apart. People simply need structure – it’s the only way we work effectively!
Another thing you should be mindful of is how to correct people who fall back on the wrong channel or old habits. Don’t be harsh or overly critical; approach it with a lighter touch. First, understand why they did it (maybe there’s something you missed), then explain why it was incorrect, and agree on how to handle it in the future.
And of course, as with anything else we improve, we need to review and adjust things over time. Don’t expect a communication rule to stay relevant for 3–4 years; that is simply not how things work. Tools change, updates happen, and procedures and team members evolve – so your communication guidelines need updates too. Make sure you amend them whenever necessary.
Well, that is it for effective communication. Until the next article, stay happy, safe, and healthy!