Your startup won't grow while your employees discuss things in direct messages. Every discussion should be public. Every piece of knowledge should be shareable with everyone inside your company.
Discuss everything in public channels
Discord, Slack, or even mailing lists, all discussions inside your company should be public. Everyone inside it should be capable of giving an opinion about the theme that was discussed if they want, and you should promote a culture where all employees have an idea about it.
Your employee should know about the following:
- What other people are talking about that theme;
- Why other people are talking about that theme;
- What is the opinion from everyone about that theme;
- What is the path and the strategy that they are taking based on what has been discussed about that theme;
Promoting a culture of learning in public
Do you know what issues your coworkers are solving? If someone asks you what the people next to you are solving, can you explain it in some detail? Do you know what progress has been made? If, for some reason, your coworker needs to stay off for some days, maybe because sick, can you take their issue and finish it in a few days, or will you need to take time to understand what was the pieces of the puzzle that your friend found?
Promoting a culture where each other knows what is going on, what is their issues and the issues of their coworkers and how and why they did some decisions is a way to turn your company more antifragile, stronger, and goes faster than your competitors.
How could I create this culture in my company?
- Create an environment where everyone can ask any question and everyone can help solve the doubt; questions should be in your public channels;
- Every time that doubt was solved, incentive them to create an article on your internal documentation* about the issue and how they can solve it and a blog post talking about the problem;
- Promote events where everyone can interacts with each other, in some way can improve what they know about each other and improve the "general-knowledge" context about your company, codebase or anything else.
Here at Woovi, we promote a culture of shareable knowledge from each other in the company, every discussion is made on public channels and we have a internal documentation with a lot of notes about issues and other internal things, like architecture decisions, etc. We need it to move faster than our competitors.
If you think that fits into this culture and wants to work in a place like that, we are hiring!
Top comments (4)
Overall this is well said and aligns with how I've structured slack at my company.
I will add that this is more an ideal than a strict mantra to live by with companies. In reality, there are going to be certain discussions that require privacy and restricted access. Sometimes that's a legal requirement, other times you need to refine ideas with a smaller crowd before elevating to a wider audience. These of course are the exceptions, the vast majority of your company's comms should be public to the rest of the company.
Hi! This is really interesting to me - I'm hoping to implement a similar culture at my current company. Would you be open to chatting so I can learn more from your experience?
Hey! Feel free to ask me any question. I'm really happy to help you learn more about the theme.
Sent an email!