I, and nearly everyone I've worked with, use Teams/Slack as async comms. Most of my colleagues are incredibly busy, so there's no expectation that we'll get an immediate, real-time, response. Generally, if real-time comms is needed, and the other party didn't respond via chat immediately, we ask "Can you jump on a quick call?"
What I've seen over the past 2-3 years is (company) email increasingly devolve most, though not all of the time, into announcements, automated workflow, and other FYI. If you're actually looking for a personalized response, even not immediate, the channel is chat in some form.
I don't like it really. Email was a respond in a day medium. Chat is now at least same day/hours. In general, people don't call out of the blue any longer though so chat is inevitably repurposed for pretty soon. I'm having to readjust workflows to that.
>the other party didn't respond via chat immediately, we ask "Can you jump on a quick call?"
That still asssumes they're always monitoring chat in near-real-time.
Rarely, I get a "Is this a good time to call you on your cell?" More frequently, "can we set up a video call soonest?" My point was, I don't know the last time I've had someone from work just call me out of the blue on my phone. And, honestly, there are only a handful of people outside of doctors/service people/etc. who do.
Back in the day, the phone rang--if not constantly--very frequently.
That’s how I work. Email is basically just there for things that need to be in “writing” like approvals or various requests. Teams is where I communicate, I get msgs like “approval is in your email” because I only check email when asked to. If it’s urgent or requires a real conversation then it’s a teams call otherwise it’s all done through chat.
Just throwing in some anecdata but this is how it has been used in the place I've worked at since the pandemic started.
Prior to remote work being basically the norm these tools were used more like traditional real-time chat in my personal experience (I'm sure it varies even still based on particular workplaces), but now its generally async with the possibility (but not expectation) of being synchronous if you happen to catch someone randomly available to be bothered at the specific time you send the message.
