“Love the positive tone and quick help!”.“I’m not quite sure I’ve got the voice & tone right at all here”.“It’s really important to me to get the tone right here would really appreciate your insights!”.We’ve even got a “Buffer Tone Guide” that I find to be quite inspiring reading. We talk a LOT about tone at Buffer–we find it’s very related to how something feels. It was really neat to see the word “tone” in our word cloud.

Getting help and advice come as second nature to most of us, and we’re all honored when we’re asked for advice or help from another teammate. For smaller decision, it’s ideal to speak with fewer people and for some, possibly with no one. In general, the larger a decision, the more people you might ask for advice. We’ve talked a bit before about how we use the advice process to make good decisions: Words like “help” and “advice” appear fairly prominently in our chats. It shifts the focus from the item or task or object and places it onto the person. We’ve learned that focusing on someone else’s feelings-as opposed to their thoughts or personal tastes-adds a deeper layer of empathy to the discussion. We talk a lot about how things feel at Buffer, as opposed to how they seem or what we think. Seeing the word “feel” along the lower right of the word cloud made me smile. Is it the same where you are?Īnd because of that, it’s the place where we tend to share our top-of-the-workday greetings. Slack is pretty much the way we each “log in” to the office every morning (or whenever we choose to work). This is one of ways of sharing this gratitude and keeping lines of communication open and positive. In a spirit of positivity and gratitude, we’re grateful for all thoughts we get to hear from others, whether they take the form of praise, feedback, or a tough question. It’s how we greet many thoughts and questions from both teammates and customers. “Great one!” is an exclamation you’re likely to read on Buffer’s chats pretty much every day. Less declarative words help us work on our value of listening, by taking the approach that everything is a hypothesis: Great one!īoth “great” and “one” feature prominently on our word cloud, and I have a suspicion as to why. At Buffer, it’s rare to hear to hear definitive words like “definitely” or “certainly.” Seeing words like ‘”might,” “maybe,” and “sense” in the word cloud makes a lot of sense. Uncertainty words: might, maybe, sense, probably, hunch

They’re fun, positive and easy to understand in any language.Ī smiley face is appended to at least half of all messages you might read in our Slack account :) Yes, emojis (and GIFs!) are a huge part of the way our global team communicates. The words “simple smile,” “smile/grinning” and “thumbsup” are probably a bit better known as ?, ?, and ?. It’s a lot of fun to think on the patterns one can discover in here I’ll share a few that I noticed especially. This is a word cloud of the whole team’s communication on Slack, our main form of communication, over the last few months. What does this look like in practice? I’d love to show you! We answer in more words than needed (and often more smiley faces than expected) to make sure our message is clear and received positively. We try to avoid certainty that our way is the best (or that there even is a best way). We think the best of each of our teammates. Only positivity and gratitude.Īs we work on living the Buffer values, we work on our language and communication as well, giving thought to every word and how it will be felt by its recipient. No brusquely worded requests, no passive aggressive notes, no office politics. There are literally no harsh words at Buffer, or at least none that I’ve ever heard. Something a lot of people tend to be surprised about when they join the Buffer team (or even speak to a Buffer teammate for an extended time) is how specific, deliberate, and careful we are with the language we use. Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate.

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