One interesting challenge with this real-time vs. async communication challenge is that different job roles have different needs. At my company, most of our employees have been on the customer service side until recently, and Slack is great for them. Almost everything they need to talk about is urgent (even if it's not important) and temporary. They rarely have long-lasting high-level conversations.
Now we're starting to hire more developers and I'm realizing how disruptive it is for them to be pulled into Slack conversations all the time. So I've started using email more for communicating with the devs, and that seems to work reasonably well.
The questions I have are: (a) is it possible to have a single communication tool that handles both real-time and async properly and (b) does that even matter? Maybe email+Slack is a perfectly fine solution. Either way, it's obvious that only using Slack isn't a viable option.
Now we're starting to hire more developers and I'm realizing how disruptive it is for them to be pulled into Slack conversations all the time. So I've started using email more for communicating with the devs, and that seems to work reasonably well.
The questions I have are: (a) is it possible to have a single communication tool that handles both real-time and async properly and (b) does that even matter? Maybe email+Slack is a perfectly fine solution. Either way, it's obvious that only using Slack isn't a viable option.