💬How we communicate
General
At Fabric, we do all our communication in our company Discord. In addition to making it quick and easy to message someone, it has the advantage that we can talk directly to a subset of our users in the place where we already do our work.
As a result, channels are split into internal channels (prefixed with int) and public channels (with a 💬 icon as a prefix). When writing anything in public channels (or anywhere outside of the private channels), you're acting as an ambassador for the company so are expected to represent it well.
Daily use of Discord
Rather than personally rate-limiting your communication, you should freely post messages when a thought occurs to you (even if that's at 4am), and the other party can pick it up when they're next around (which might be sooner than you think). This is better than holding onto a thought and forgetting it/things moving more slowly as a result.
We use tagging when we want someone's attention, e.g. to bring them into a conversation, or get their attention on a specific message. If someone has not been tagged, you should assume that there's a decent chance they'll miss the message (particularly if the conversation is in a separate thread).
If there's an actual emergency, then we phone/use WhatsApp rather than use Discord – that way the communication channel helps to describe the level of urgency.
Public by default
Rather than information being lost in DMs, or being unnecessarily duplicated to give someone context, all conversations should happen in open threads inside our internal Discord channels. Simply spin one up whenever there is something to share/discuss, and tag any relevant team members to ensure they see it. If someone else needs to get involved later, they can simply be tagged into the conversation and read to pick up the context – it's a form of living documentation.
Proactive communication
At Fabric, everyone shares their progress, problems and more, proactively – this means doing so as a matter of habit, and not only when someone asks for an update. This way we simulate the serendipity of a physical office, regardless of distance – everyone can see what others are working on, can ask questions about it etc.
Daily chatbot
Every week-day, our Discord chatbot asks what you will be getting done on that particular day – simply respond to it each morning with a set of bullet-points. If the task is small and self-contained within the day, outline it here, and if it's a larger task, say which part of the larger task will be completed that day.
We try to keep meetings minimal so that everyone can spend more time doing uninterrupted work. Of course, feel free to grab someone for an ad hoc call – sometimes real-time audio/video is the best to way to reach resolution quickly.
Otherwise, we do have 2 types of regular meeting:
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