The Tools And Tactics Behind How We Communicate Internally At Drift

How does your company manage internal communication?

Surprisingly, one of the most popular questions people ask us at Drift is how we handle internal communication.

And I say surprisingly because, well, internal communication isn’t exactly the most riveting topic.

But there’s a reason a lot of people ask us about it:

Internal communication is one of the few things that can impact everyone at a company.

And from Slack’s growth, to a push for increased transparency, to the fact that work can happen from anywhere today, a whole lot has changed in the workplace over the last few year’s that’s impacted internal communication.

So David and I sat down on Seeking Wisdom to share the tools and tactics we use for internal communication here at Drift, including:

• How we use Slack (and when we use Slack vs. email)
• How we use Confluence (our internal Wiki)
• How we use 15Five for weekly progress reports and feedback
• The format of our Monday Metrics all-hands meeting
• Why we end the week with an all-hands Show & Tell meeting

And three core principles that we have at Drift that impact how we communicate with each other everyday:

1. Limit meetings. Try hard to get whatever you’re working on done without a meeting.
2. Show your work. Avoid the big reveal. Communicate early and often about what you’re working on.
3. Autonomy. Teams and individuals should have full autonomy and ownership over what they’re working on.

You can subscribe to Seeking Wisdom right here on iTunes to catch each new episode (or just search for Seeking Wisdom on your favorite podcast app).

For more context: Drift is currently ~30 people.

I'd love to get your thoughts here. Some questions to comment on below:

• Do you use any of the tools (outside of the obvious Slack, email etc.)
• Which regularly occurring meetings do you have at your company?
• How would you grade your company on internal communication?
• Do you have any guiding principles for how you communicate internally?