If 1/3 of their employees quit over innocuous "no politics at work chats" policy, then it seems to me that the problem is in the hiring process and not communication.
Framing it this way also ignores the extremely generous exit package anyone leaving would be getting. I'm extremely happy with my current workplace, but if they dangled the kind of offer Basecamp was dangling I'd quit willingly on the spot as well.
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.
It was irrational. While I agree that the new policy could have been rolled out differently, and likely led to a few of the bullets in this blog post, employees and the public very much over reacted.
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.
Couldn't agree more. It's disgraceful how some companies these days try to ride whichever, often short-lived, political direction is prevalent at any given moment, just to convince people they are a valid participant in the public discussion. They are not. They're there to make money, period. 37signals aren't perfect, but unlike the majority of other companies, their leaders seem to know when it's time to apologize, even when they decide to stand their ground.
I honestly don’t get how discussing politics would even allow for work to get done, at least in any company that has international employees. I work with people from California, a conservative part of Florida, the Midwest, India, Pakistan, and a half-dozen other countries. Introducing and encouraging political debate would result in absolute chaos.
Discussions, as painful as they are, allow us to bridge gaps, and see each other as human beings. Not discussing certain things only makes us silently hate each other and leads to misunderstandings compounding one on top of another.
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.
Not talking about politics doesn’t “make me hate” my coworkers. If anything, it makes me like them more, as we bond over human things, like food, not issues pushed by the media.
the issues exist anyways. the difference is the media gets to choose which issues most people should get angry about in the interest of their investors.
100% and I would also add many other topics I profoundly don't understand why they're being addressed at work... I can count on one hand the numbers of emails I have about work work compared to many other subjects lol
The policy was sparked by employees complaining about horrible behavior, and then rather than deal with the horrible behavior they decided to ban discussions about it.
> 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.
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.
They were banned from talking about any sort of politics in the internal chats, not outside. That is something It was consider basic work polite behavior until very recently. Ironically, now that many people only can see some topics as "good vs evil", is when it is needed the most.
Do you get paid to discuss political beliefs at work, likely via channels provided to you by your employer? In most western countries, it is in fact against the law to misuse the company's resources for private reasons. Unless your employer lets you, which is fine and very common these days, yet not a right nevertheless.
Is it acceptable for you to start a political discussion, for example on anti-china sentiment, in your company’s main channel? Has anything like that happened before in your work?
They expected some amount of employees to leave(not sure it was 1/3 though). This was during a time when the country was in the midst of some very contentious social issues. I believe the public communique was perhaps to provide precedent for other companies who wanted to make the same move, but were not courageous enough to do so on their own.
I also heard that they offered very generous severance packages(6 months salary), so there may have been other factors contributing to the exodus.
If you have just got your first job, this is what the old era was like, when the Federal Reserve was going brrrrr. You just quit and find another job, do the leetcode, get 4 offers, get your 500k-1M TC. Apparently.
I’m not sure I find this document to be a good example of careful and effective communication. Quite a few of those bullet points seem repetitive, and it feels more like someone flushed out their thoughts somewhat randomly, rather than trying to bring them into a clear and concise structure. I would personally prefer the main take-aways to be condensed into fewer points, each with some additional text for context and nuance. For a guide, I think I’d find that easier to grasp and memoize.
Agreed, it's even more irritating that the very first bullet point is grammatically wrong as well, further highlighting how poorly this whole "guide" has been communicated itself:
I’ll stand corrected. I’m not a native English speaker and when I saw “can not” it immediately reminded me of my school teacher in Europe who was very particular about these things and teaching us as wrong. Even as I typed my response now my iPhone tries to autocorrect it to cannot, so I genuinely thought it was wrong. TIL I guess.
That was a lot of bullet points, but doing more communication asynchronously is good. I have a small company so it’s obviously easy mode, but we got rid of slack and it’s been great.
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
I am curious how getting rid of Slack at a small company plays out in practice. Do people now just text each other on their personal phones? Or do they send emails to each other many times a day? How does someone ask "Hey, are you still coming to this meeting?"
Some good items in there but I disagree 100% with Guideline 25:
> 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.
I think this depends on the relationship between sender and recipient.
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.
That's a good example where power dynamics can infuse expectations.
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.
> You're applying non-contextual black and white thinking. The article leaves room for context and nuance.
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.
Speaking English poorly doesn't imply writing will be as poor. I work in Japan and have colleagues who I'll struggle to communicate with verbally, yet I don't have the same issue over text.
I've gone the other way in my life (native English speaker learning several other languages. I speak one fluently, and two others at a basic level. I live in continental Europe and the country I'm in has 3 official and 4 national languages).
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.
It feels like you'll have to play the communication game in hard mode either way, I don't see any guide that will help you short of "spare a lot of time, make efforts and try to find ways that are somewhat efficient".
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.
Dictation has to be corrected and requires knowledge of how to use a computer. I’m telling you that most of the employees at BigCo have the technical prowess of proverbial grandparents. The fact that they can open zoom and outlook at all is a small miracle.
> Most of the company can barely type. Many don’t speak fluent English. They will not able to write to communicate.
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.
> 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.
It would be great if they focused on more of a complete picture. Meetings, email, instant messages are all tools in the communication toolbox. Each one has their use.
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.
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
There's no better feeling than opening some docs and seeing the revision process in the comments, or displaying a task and see the long history of comments of what people have tried or found while searching for a solution. More often than not, you don't need to ask further clarifications. I'm a big supporter of task/project/design logs. Kinda like a lab notebook. I put interesting links, thoughts, updates on mines.
The key to remote is asynchronous, centralized and persistent long-form writings.
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.
I might have missed the joke here, but the meaning of “you can not not communicate” is pretty clear. Silence has meaning, as does indifference. The point being that communication is something you should do consciously, practice and improve on.
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)
> Every workday at 16:30, Basecamp (the product) automatically asks every employee “What did you work on today?” Whatever people write up is shared with everyone in the company.
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.
The work place has gradually become a scene where many discussions are happening, and it much ain't about work... as some have said in the comments, it's very hard to address this changing the hiring process - but it can definitely help support a healthy team dynamic.
> who would likely fare very poorly in any political situation
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.
Hilarious title - 37signals is surely now associated with the opposite of expertise in this area? It'd be like taking advice from "Paul von Hinderberg's Guide To Safe Passenger Aviation" or "Gerald Ratner's Surefire Tips For Sales Success!"
To be fair, people can indeed learn lessons from bad decisions. When you do, sharing them with others is a great way to help others avoid making the same mistakes.
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.
37 Signals communicate way better now than they did in 2021. There were obviously lessons learned.
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.
I felt like this reading Never split the difference when the author mentions in one of the first cases that the hostages died (and he was the negotiator).
Are you saying that he was wrong, and tech workers do have the same work ethic as garbage men, or are you saying that the comparison was inappropriate?
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.
WTF does #20 mean? "Occasionally pick random words, sentences, or paragraphs and hit delete. Did it matter?" JF and DHH are among the biggest narcissists I've ever met.
It just an editing action, but proposed without nuance. Books I've read on communication and writing emphasized simplicity and clarity. I use iA Writer and there is an option to mark filler words, so you can check if you really need them in the sentence. I wouldn't do it randomly, but you can express your points in fewer lines. Sometimes I write entire paragraphs on HN and don't post it afterwards, because after rereading, I find it adds little to the conversation and was more an emotional response.
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 than spending 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.
The problem is that anyone who later needs to know what was in the meeting, even the two original participants, has no access to it. On the whole, more time is lost by people not being able to refer to what was actually said later than is saved by having it quickly and synchronously. You're making more work for yourself and everybody else in the long run.
Information overload. There’s tons of info on our Slack, but the vast majority is noise. If you saved transcripts from all Zoom meetings it would be mostly noise too. The benefit of meetings is that they be chaotic. Creating something succinct and sharable from them should be done later as a singular focused activity and stored in a wiki.
Default to async, hire people reasonable enough to request upgrading to synchronous communications when needed (cover ground faster or clear up miscommunications) but used judiciously.
The pacing part can be an issue. In particular when face to face people will want to look smarter, and let things slide even if they don't completely understand them, to preserve the flow.
It's only afterwards that it comes back to bite both sides.
> 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.
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.
Happens every time, that is way we write the "As per our meeting, we've decided that..." emails. Even with those, people still end with different interpetations
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...