Can you imagine working on a company where e-mail is not a thing?

Weird, eh? I thought so too in the beginning. The truth is, using emails to communicate helps the creation of silos and is the recipe for information to get lost.

Think about it. Decision-making, thought process, nuances, everything that is discussed in an email is lost if the people involved leave the company. Also, there’s no visibility.

I had never thought about it until I joined Automattic. We have our own way of communicating. It’s one of the main things that keeps a company 100% distributed over 90 countries and all time zones working well!

We communicate a lot- Communication is Oxygen. It’s in our creed after all.

Transparency has also to be a conscious choice that is taken seriously. But how we do it?

I shared a while ago about how we stay connected, using Slack, water cooler channels, and even through a 24-hour long 5K relay to create that connection. But what about work?

When it comes to communication about work, we do not use e-mail. We use a very special tool we call P2. P2s are, in essence, blogs. But they have a special tweak and we use them as our collective brain. Everything, from project discussions, to HR decisions, to team updates, to product feedback. Everything goes on a P2. Posts are created, comments, suggestions, decisions and solutions are threaded, which makes it easy to follow, see and find.

We have P2s for everything (both work and non-work related things).

Everything we think, share, discuss, decide, stays there.

Are you new to the company and trying to understand why something works the way it works? Just do a quick search (we have a global search tool that looks into everything) and you will find everything that is related to that in one (or several) P2s.

When a team or a project no longer exists, we retire a P2, just to make sure people accessing it knows that specific one is no longer active, but it’s still accessible and searchable.

Sure, we all still have an email address and an inbox that is mostly used to communicate with external partners, vendors, etc and to get notifications.

Yes, notifications. Because since ALL the information is there, for anyone to see, we (each employee) decide what we want to read, follow and be notified about.

In my case, I first subscribe to the P2s that are relevant to my role and to the ones related to the company in general. Like the P2 about the company finances.

Then I subscribe to some out of curiosity, like data and security.

And others for fun, like the P2 we have about tattoos where any Automatticians can share their new nice tattoos.

Looking from the outside it might look like a gigantic plate of entangled noodles. But it works! You can call it organized chaos if you want. But the reality is that is very reassuring to know that information will never get lost.