Group Chat: The Best Way to Totally Stress Out Your TeamBusiness

By Angel Pappas

Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting, with random participants, and no agenda.

Over the past few years, persistent group chat tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams have taken hold — and strangled companies. What began as a novel way to quickly communicate company-wide has become a heavy-handed interruption factory with serious consequences.

Now co-workers are expected to follow dozens of conversations in real-time, all the time. People are dedicating large fraction of their screens to a never-ending conveyor belt of conversation pile-ups. The mental overhead, and repetitive visual switchbacking, is exhausting. It’s repression through over-communication. People have had enough. The rebellion has begun.

Chat is appealing. It provides short term communication pleasure at the expense of long term organizational health. All sorts of things begin to go wrong when groups begin communicating in real-time, one line at a time, all the time.

Based on our decade of discoveries, we’ve put together a list of the positive and negative impacts of group chat on an organization. If you’ve gone chat-first, or you’re considering heading down that path, we encourage you to review and consider these impacts on your own organization. And if you’ve already gone all-in, this document may be the catalyst for reconsideration.

The positives of chat

1. Hashing things out quickly.

When you need to toss an idea back and forth between a few people, there’s nothing better than chat. Toss in some words, drag in a picture, get some quick feedback, and move on (just get out quick before you get sucked back in).

2. Red alerts.

Sometimes it’s essential to get critical information in front of people. A server’s down, a deployment failed, there’s a crisis that truly demands a group’s immediate attention. There are a variety of ways to get this instant information to people, and piping it into a high priority chat room or channel is definitely one of those ways.

3. Having fun.

Fun at work is as important as work at work. And chat really works well here. Culture develops, inside jokes flow, emoji, cat pics are circulated, and meme generators are perfect territory for the chat room or channel.

4. A sense of belonging.

This is particularly important for people who work remotely. Having a chat room where you can just say good morning, let people know you’re out for lunch, and generally just feel part of something is a powerful counter to cabin fever.

The negatives of chat

1. Mental fatigue and exhaustion.

Following group chat all day feels like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda. And in many cases, a dozen all-day meetings! You hear it from people all the time — it’s exhausting. Constant conversation, constant chatter, no start, no end. You can decide not to pay attention, but that leads to a fear of missing out.

2. An ASAP culture.

At its very core, group chat and real-time communication is all about now. That’s why in some select circumstances it really shines. But chat conditions us to believe everything’s worth discussing quickly right now, except that hardly anything is. Turns out, very few things require ASAP attention. Further, ASAP is inflationary — it devalues any request that doesn’t say ASAP. Before you know it, the only way to get anything done is by throwing it in front of people and asking for their immediate feedback. It’s like you’re constantly tapping everyone’s shoulder — or pulling on everyone’s shirt — to get them to stop what they’re doing and turn around to address what’s on your mind. It’s not a sustainable practice.

3. Rambling and repetition.

Conversations that should take a few minutes often go on for 20+ when they happen over group chat. Continuous conversations among a group of people are very difficult to end — especially when new people can pop in to drop in their quick 2 cents at any time. Just when you feel like the conversation is almost over, they can start right up again — often rehashing what’s already been discussed before. “We’ve already talked about this!” is a common refrain heard in chat rooms around the world.

4. Chat reminds you that you’re behind.

Group chat feels like you’re chasing something all day long. What’s worse, group chat often causes “return anxiety” — a feeling of dread when you’re away for a while and you come back to dozens (hundreds?) of unread lines. Are you supposed to read each one? If you don’t, you might miss something important. So you read up or skip out at your own risk. All the while you’re trying to piece together interleaving conversations that may refer to other things you haven’t seen yet. And just when you’re caught up, you’re behind again. It’s like your working two jobs — the work you’re supposed to do, and the work of catching up on what you missed that probably didn’t matter (but you won’t know until you read back).

5. 25 used to mean 1.

If you have one unread email, you see a “1” in your inbox. That one unread may be a complete thought, a dozen lines, or maybe even longer. But it’s a “1”. 1 unit to absorb. Compare that with the number of lines it takes to communicate the same thing in chat. Since chat is mostly one-line-at-a-time — even long lines — it’s an unread multiplier. A conversation that used to be a 1 or a 2 in email, is now a 25 or 40 or 100+. Plus all the other replies that come in as someone’s talking. Group chat breeds big numbers. The bigger the numbers, the more you’re missing. And the vicious cycle continues. This takes a mental toll.

Chat attacks attention and severely hinders deep work

Attention is one of your most precious resources. If something else controls your attention, that something else controls what you’re capable of. Full attention is required to do great work. So when something like a pile of group chats, and the expectations that come along with them, systematically steals that resource, consider it a threat to your ability to do your best work. “Right now” is a resource worth conserving, not wasting.

That said, group chat remains an important tool in the communications toolbox. The danger is when it’s the hammer for every nail, the ubiquitous go-to default tool to communicate with colleagues. It’s far more useful for special cases than general cases. When used appropriately, sparingly, and in the right context at the right time, it’s great. You just really have to contain it, know when not to use it, and watch behavior and mood otherwise it can take over and mess up a really good thing.

And to be fair, these problems aren’t exclusive to group chat. However, the fundamentals of group chat (many people right now, one line at a time incomplete thoughts, fear of missing out (FOMO), low barriers to participation which leads to over-participation, incessant notifications, etc) tends to amplify the unintended negative consequences. You can’t separate effect from the cause.

What’s even more interesting is that 1-on-1, direct messaging/texting is a lot like email — it’s often used asynchronously. You leave something for someone else and you can be pretty sure they’ll see it when they get back to it. But in a group chat setting you can’t be sure because other people can carry on the conversation and push stuff out of the way. There are remedies for this like @mentions and starring and all that, but those are crutches and band-aids that try to mask the fatal flaw of communication on a conveyor belt that moves at different speeds depending on the number of participants. Great group communication is predictable — group chat is anything but predictable.

Communication usually fails, except by accident. Osmo Wiio

OK, so what to do instead?

Here’s some general advice on how to make the real-time/asynchronous split work in your organization:

Stop expecting everyone to be in chat all day long. Don’t set an expectation that people should have a chat window open all day. Make chat something you bounce into and out of purposefully, not stick around all day.

If it’s important, slow down. If it’s an important conversation, it shouldn’t happen in the chat room. Chat should be about quick, ephemeral things. Important topics need time, traction, and separation from the rest of the chatter.

Treat group chats like conference calls — don’t get everyone on the line. The smaller the chat the better the chat. Think of it like a conference call. A conference call with 3 people is perfect. A call with 6 or 7 is chaotic and woefully inefficient. Group chats are no different. Be careful inviting the whole gang when you only need a few.

Set expectations that it’s OK to be unavailable. Presence is a prison. If you can turn off presence, turn it off. If you can’t, make sure people understand that it’s OK to be unavailable. That turning off chat — quitting, closing, snoozing, whatever — should be perfectly acceptable. If someone’s not available it should signal that they’re working, not taking a break.

Get off the conveyor belt

When tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams put chat first, they put your team’s mental energy last. They increase anxiety, they double down on information scatter, they load your team up with FOMO stress, and they shatter your day into dozens of fragments. They make work worse.

It’s common in the software industry to blame the users. It’s the user’s fault. They don’t know how to use it. They’re using it wrong. They need to do this or do that. But the reality is that tools encourage specific behaviors. A product is a series of design decisions with a specific outcome in mind. Yes, you can use tools as they weren’t intended, but most people follow the patterns suggested by the design. And so in the end, if people are exhausted and feeling unable to keep up, it’s the tool’s fault, not the user’s fault. If the design leads to stress, it’s a bad design.

So, whichever side you’re on, whatever tools you use, keep in mind how they affect other people, not just what they appear to help you get done. Done doesn’t matter if people are wrecked along the way.

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