> email heavy workflow

What do you mean by this? I send 5-15 emails a day at a minimum throughout the day and receive just as many directly with another 2-3x as cc in various distribution lists (which I read in full). Add in server notifications, automated reports from data processing scripts, and the generic info@company.com inbox and it's probably close to 100 in a day with ease. Lots of skimming and Ctrl-Q'ing and it's hardly a burden.

The lasting power of email is that it's one of the few federated communication channels that has a global network effect. Email and chat are two different media for different purposes. You have plausible deniability when a single message in a group chat is missed. When an email is sent to the team with a change in procedure you can have some expectations that it will be seen and it also provides a one-one or one-many channel for clarification.

I'm not familiar with how the sales world works but I use email every day with clients, vendors, the team, my boss(es), and many other intra-company relationships. I think you have a lack of imagination in this regard :)

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scarface_74 4 days ago | parent [-]

> various distribution lists (which I read in full). Add in server notifications, automated reports from data processing scripts,

And all of those can just as easily be sent to a Slack channel without everyone bothering to create email rules since they are automatically sent to the correct Slack channel where if it’s an actionable alert, a responsible party can add an “ack” reaction that kicks off a workflow that says this person is handling it.

This can also be integrated into your CRM or wherever you call something like ServiceNow. We have all sorts of workflows and integrations with Slack.

> You have plausible deniability when a single message in a group chat is missed. When an email is sent to the team with a change in procedure you can have some expectations that it will be seen and it also provides a one-one or one-many channel for clarification

How are you any less likely to miss an email than miss a channel set aside for leadership announcements that only certain people can send a message too? Then you also have the “reply all” issue that I’ve seen blow up email servers. Messages allow threading etc in Slack and it’s a lot easier to ignore a thread that doesn’t pertain to you and follow those that do.

Everyone at our 1000 person company communicates through Slack up to an including our CEO for announcements and updates.

I don’t think I’ve emailed someone internally in over 8 years except to forward an external email and during that time, I’ve worked for startups and the second largest employer in the US.

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hebocon 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Ironically, the only use I have for Slack is to communicate with an external web developer that we contracted.

In my world... EVERYONE (50/50 internal and external) is on email and/or Teams (or the phone). It works. Shit gets done. It's a small, high-trust environment of autonomous people doing rapidly changing work.

There is a working world where email makes sense and trying to "make Slack a thing" would be (rightfully) scoffed at. If I'm yanked out of this and dropped into some Slack/ticket/KPI/whatever environment I will adapt and play ball.

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aragilar 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

In my experience, that's because corporate mail/groupware (especially anything by Microsoft) is configured so that it is completely non-productive, and so people seek out alternatives. Slack isn't as configurable, so can't be made as bad, but it's still pretty bad and builds in assumptions that make trying to use it asynchronously a major pain.

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scarface_74 4 days ago | parent [-]

How much easier can it be to work asynchronously than to use Slack? For the most part people don’t expect an immediate response. You can sync it with your corporate calendar to see when people are in meetings or on PTO, it tells you other people’s time zones and when there are on PTO and thier status. Most importantly, you can schedule messages.

There are times where I’m running errands during the day or traveling and working late and I schedule a message for 8:00 or 9:00 their time.

	▲	aragilar 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Decent email is significantly better than slack at the actual asynchronous part, but if you wanted something chat-like zulip is decent though I'd argue the whole chat-like sphere is never any good at asynchronous. The issue isn't people being in a different timezone in a one-to-one setup (that's easy to do), and if direct answers from a group are needed then it's not too different, but having any kind of sensible asynchronous discussion on slack is basically impossible (having suffered through far too many). Email (and to a lesser extent forums) are far better for this.