How we communicate ​

We communicate differently than many companies. We aim to capture, preserve, and share organizational knowledge without disrupting deep work. We do this by making an investment up front in time or tool adoption so that future work can benefit from the knowledge we create now.

Async by default ​

Convictional is an asynchronous communication culture by default.

Our async approach reflects all of our core values: Focus Intensity, Caring Deeply, Extreme Simplicity, Disciplined Growth and Craft Excellence. We originally adopted team norms around communication practices and existing tools but have started using our own product to help our team align on goals.

Some companies view most communications as temporary, happening over transient mediums like Slack or other chat tools. While these tools have their place for real-time coordination, we believe the loss of institutional knowledge and disruption to deep focus is costly. The growth of learning and knowledge creation tends to be a leading indicator of business growth, so we prioritize capturing decisions and the reasoning behind them.

Long-form writing ​

We consider long-form written content to be a better way to organize thoughts. So you will likely not see an internal slide deck or our company using Slack messaging.

Working in public ​

A doc or other work artifact that lives in your personal folder isn’t useful to the team. Instead it should live in the appropriate shared team location where others in the company with appropriate authorization can leverage it. This practice also has the advantage of allowing our AI knowledge search tools access to the artifact.

Email over chat ​

We have an email happy culture. Lots of discussions and debates that would typically happen in meetings elsewhere, happen in emails at Convictional. This asynchronicity allows us to focus on deep work and get more done. If you want to toss ideas around, consider trajectory ramifications, or simply get eyes on something you’ve been working on, an email is a better way to go about this versus using a chat tool like Slack.

Minimize the number of people on email chains so that they include only the people who can immediately impact the conversation. You can always include others later on. This is done in an effort to maximize the contribution of each party. When there’s 6 people on an email thread, you know that three people will dominate the conversation, two might chime in a couple times, and one probably won’t ever respond. This is a waste of time for everyone except the three who are actively engaged.

It’s okay to send each other emails containing links to content or other things that you find interesting on the internet. If you would like a response on those emails, indicate that in the email so the person can triage accordingly.

Occasionally, we need to backchannel emails. We do this ad-hoc to maintain alignment and harmony. This is not gossip, but a sidebar to gather context, get opinions, and receive feedback/coaching. When backchanneling an email, always include the “subject” (person, project, or customer) being discussed and make specific requests to the person you’re backchanneling to. Always write back channeled emails so that it wouldn’t be a problem if the subject read it directly, but don’t be afraid to be candid either.

Meetings ​

We try to only have meetings when necessary, and aim for them to be as short as possible while still achieving the meeting’s purpose. Every meeting should have a problem statement/explicit purpose. Define the agenda at the start of the meeting. When it is no longer necessary to be in the meeting, you should quietly leave if you have other work to do. We tend to minimize any team wide meetings as recurring calendar events.

Recently, the idea of working remotely has become more normalised but in reality we tend to forget a lot of critical business norms. A simple example; using our cameras during certain meetings. This changes from meeting to meeting, but we should always try to have our cameras on. At Convictional, we want all of our meetings to establish sociological safety and trust amongst the participants. Seeing the other person is a simple way to help contribute to this. As we build trust among the team, the needs may change and it could be unnecessary in all meetings. That’s fine, but call it out and have everyone turn them off.

You will come to discover at Convictional, team members are very good with mute functionality. In large group settings, it’s critical to use. In a one on one setting, not required at all. You should join almost all meetings on mute. In Google Meet, it’s very easy to do so and if the meeting has multiple people in it, you could be interrupting. In a physical space, you would be able to see this when walking into a room. In the virtual world, it’s not as easy. During active conversation, we use the unmute functionality as a signal to indicate you want to contribute. If you have thoughts to share and before unmuting, you notice someone who is not currently speaking and unmuted, then wait for them to share their thoughts.

Being late to a meeting virtually can be just as disruptive as in a physical space. If you find yourself late to a one on one, the other person should be pinged. It’s a simple 10 second task. When you are running the meeting, if someone is late or they lose connectivity, it’s often helpful to backfill context. This can be most natural if the conversation is transitioning topics, “Hey XXX, I saw you lost your connection for a second. You missed XYZ and ABC were the conclusions we hit. Let’s move on to DEF.” A simple act like this can keep everyone in the loop. The goal isn’t to recreate the conversation that was missed.

We default to using Convictional’s meeting tool to set the agenda, record, transcribe and extract summaries, action items, and decisions made in the meeting. If there is a follow up needed that requires context from the meeting, you can leverage the built in meeting summary chat feature to collaborate closest to the work.

Async video and screen recording ​

Oftentimes it would be useful to communicate something via video, like a presentation or demonstration. Instead of doing a meeting, consider creating a recording and sharing it with your audience for async viewing and feedback. This has the benefit of giving the audience the opportunity to view and comment on at their own pace and timeline.

Weekly updates ​

Since Convictional was founded, the team has kept up the practice of writing weekly updates. We now do this using Convictional’s weekly update feature which emails each employee at the end of the week with a link to fill out that week's update. Everyone is expected to submit their weekly updates. They consist of simple prompts like “What did you accomplish this week?” and “What do you plan on accomplishing next week?”. Additionally, custom AI-generated prompts may arise based on your current work focus, and teammates that own company goals update status on these each week. At the start of each week, employees make it a practice to catch up on what their teammates are working on, and can collaborate on weekly updates to get more context or offer encouragement.

Seek before asking ​

There is a high likelihood that a topic or question has been considered by our team before. Use the tools we have, including Convictional’s knowledge search to seek out the answer or context before requesting help from a teammate. If you find a past decision, document or discussion and still have a question, you can likely ask right within the knowledge artifact. And if after a quick search leaves you empty handed feel free to email a teammate.

Communicate closest to the work ​

We have access to various communication mediums that range from low-context environments to high context environments. An example of low-context communication is a direct chat message. The full context of the conversation needs to be created from scratch. For example, if someone direct messages a teammate to ask a question about a specific project’s task, the person needs to spend time articulating the context before getting to the question. If possible, it’s best to collaborate within the work artifacts themselves. In our example, it would be better to @mention someone within the Convictional task to ask your question.

Decision making ​

Written communication is a good way to go back and forth on a decision. Almost no decisions are urgent, and therefore do not require real-time communication. Those decisions can happen over email, or for major decisions within a Convictional Decision Process. The beauty of written formats is that you can see how the decision was arrived at, including the valid arguments on both sides of it. Some people in organizations tend to become bottlenecks, both in terms of work output and knowledge. That is solved, and those people scaled, through writing.

Meetings are often the least effective for important decision making. While we leverage Convictional’s Meeting tool for recording and decision extraction, our experience and learning from decision science research shows that decisions made in meetings tend to suffer from groupthink. Social, personality and power dynamics creep in and the best parts of group decision-making – surfacing and integrating unique ideas and preferences – often get silenced or minimized. All Convictional teammates are empowered to identify when a big decision may be made in a meeting and propose the decision be worked in an async Convictional Decision Process, that forces more rigor with named criteria, options considered, and inputs from the team.