How do you deal with slow / phone culture?

Question

I recently started a new job where I'm building a website and some software infrastructure for a brand new company. I have been a professional developer for over a decade and worked in many teams large and small, as well as both business and tech driven orgs.The company exists because the person who founded another organization got some investment and now he's moving forward with part of the business the investment org isn't interested in.The challenge I have is that I'm a very software / technical oriented person who is used to thinks like Slack, emailing to setup appointments and scheduling things in the future.I am working with a group of people who are older than me who prefer email and telephone over anything else. Rather than scheduling time to talk they will just call each other up at random times. Often I will send emails with direct requests asking "what time is good for everyone?" and not receive a response at all. I want to plead with the team for better communications but I have not been at the organization long enough to have the political capital to make this happen.Can anybody suggest articles / books / materials that might help me figure out how to best communicate with this audience? These are not new challenges but I'm failing to describe it to Google in a way that gives me any meaningful responses.Thanks

PragmaticPulp · Accepted Answer

> Often I will send emails with direct requests asking "what time is good for everyone?" and not receive a response at all.
Be more proactive. Make things easy for the people you’re communicating with. Don’t send e-mails asking others to schedule your meeting for you.
Send an e-mail with a proposed time. Include a meeting invite. Tell people to inform you if the time doesn’t work.
More broadly: It doesn’t sound like the rest of the company is struggling to communicate with each other, but rather that they’re not communicating in the exact way you prefer.
There is no singular “right” way for a company to communicate. Part of good communication is learning to adapt to how the company interacts with each other.
If the company likes phone calls, it’s time to learn how to like phone calls. Pick up the phone and make the call for someone you know isn’t going to read their email for a while. Learn the art of quick phone calls and keeping it short. Gradually try to use more email and let people know that you prefer email for yourself, but you’re not going to have much success if you try to force the rest of the company to change their entire communication style to match your personal preference.

dnh44 · Answer

If it's a small group simply picking up the phone and calling is probably more efficient compared to having an email conversation about when to talk.I've been in this situation too and I gave up on trying to change the habits of the group.

ttyprintk · Answer

I would engage an SMS-to-Slack gateway for texting, and expect a fee (you&rsquo;ll see Twilio used). I expect email is third-class and you won&rsquo;t be able to change that; voicemail is their email. Get a headset that&rsquo;s comfortable for interrupt-driven work. When stumped for search terms, consider that there are successful positions working this way, agents for professional sports players, for example.