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My 8 Chat Principles for Effective Communication šŸ’¬

Amr Saeed

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These are 8 chat principles I used to apply in any work environment. I highly believe they make communication more effective for me and the people I am communicating with.

Avoid Hello-Only Messages

A common mistake many people make when they start chatting is sending a message with a greeting like ā€œHello!ā€ or ā€œHi, are you available?ā€ and nothing more! Although the people sending the hello-only messages are trying to be polite, imagine that the person youā€™re sending this message to is unavailable at the moment. Once the person becomes available, you wonā€™t get a helpful reply, and you will have wasted the time of you both. So, itā€™s okay to send the greeting message, but make sure to directly send your request with it.

One more note is that there is a website called No Hello that was created specifically to address this issue. You can check it for more details.

Be Clear and Specific

When you chat with someone, try to avoid vague messages that could be interpreted in two ways. Take your time and put some effort into making your messages clear and specific, and your messages will get better quickly.

Avoid Voice Messages

This one highly depends on the nature of your work environment. But the general rule of thumb is that If your chat supports the voice messages feature, try to avoid using it as much as you can unless itā€™s a common thing in your company. The reason is that sometimes people really want to reply to your voice messages but might be in a situation where listening to voice messages is not an option, and this could lead to ignoring your messages until the option is available.

Let Meetings Be Your Last Resort

Weā€™re in the era of meetings, where people do meetings more than they work! If you want to request something from someone, avoid asking for a meeting first. Try to send a detailed message explaining your issue first, and ask for a meeting only when you donā€™t seem to get clear answers. Because the person youā€™re talking to might have straightforward answers to your questions, although you might think there arenā€™t.

Wait for the Reply

If itā€™s not urgent, donā€™t follow a message with other messages that ask for the same thing, especially if the interval between the messages is short. Let the person take their time responding to you, as they might be on a tight schedule doing something or might not be available at the moment. Only when you think it took so long for the person to reply, send a new message checking for updates.

Always Assume Good Intentions

Itā€™s so common to misinterpret someoneā€™s messages while chatting. One of the reasons is that we canā€™t see the other personā€™s expressions. Especially when their nature is to send short messages with scarce words or when they donā€™t use emojis regularly. That could make you think the personā€™s tone is sharp, but it might not necessarily be that. So, always assume good intentions!

Send Request to a Single Person

When you send someone a request, donā€™t send the same request to multiple people with the same privileges in parallel, especially if this could lead to problems or duplicate efforts. But if itā€™s urgent, make sure to let them know that you did that.

Use the Formal Communication Channels

In many situations, you might need support from a specific team. If the team has a formal group channel for this, itā€™s always good to respect their system and avoid sending direct messages to them. Sending your requests to the group channel will make it easier for them to track and handle them, and the requests will get the chance to be handled by one of the available members.

Finally, you need to be aware that those principles are based on my personal experience, so you might need to tweak some of them slightly to fit your case. But in general, most of them can be applied to any work environment.

Hope you enjoyed the article! šŸ˜„

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Amr Saeed

A software engineer with 5+ years working in back-end, front-end, and DevOps. Love building cool stuff that scales and making life easier for fellow developers.