Be aware of your workplace chat "personality"
In my performance feedback review 4 years ago one of my peers wrote "Satish is an awesome PM, and a great person to be around, but I noticed he had two distinct modes, work mode and friend mode, for lack of better terms. I think Satish could grow a bit in finding ways to merge the two modes and become an even more friendly and effective product manager!"
After thinking a bit more I realized that (i) what this person was calling as the friend mode was how they felt when they talked to me in person and (ii) what they were calling work mode was how they felt when they talked to me on chat.
At Facebook we do a lot of work on chat and constantly have 10s of chat threads that are live through the course of the day. I noticed three patterns in my chat communication style:
Replying in Short Phrases: When someone pinged me on chat I would give a short response right away to unblock them and go back to the work I was previously doing. People on the other end would feel I was cold / terse, ordering them around, didn't provide context / explanation, didn't care about their opinions etc even though none of those were my true intentions.
Impatient “Tone”: Sometimes I would be in flow state and people would want to discuss a topic that needs deeper thinking. I would engage in the conversation but my "tone" could be perceived as impatient since I was anxious to get back to the deep work I was doing.
Debates on Chat: Since I thought a lot of work gets done via chat, I would continue to debate deep topics on chat. Sometimes people on the other end would be impatient to get back to their work and perceive my conversation as being pushy or unnecessarily contentious. In these cases, the mood / state of the other person was impacting how they perceived my actions, but I had no visibility into them until it was too late. I was thinking "Oh this is a great debate" and the other person was thinking "This is annoying".
Identifying these patterns helped me turn my chat communication around and bring it in line with my in-person communication.
What do I do now?
Treat a chat thread as an in-person conversation: If someone stopped at my desk, I would have a bright smile and share pleasantries with them. I try to do a light weight version of it on chat, as well. I check how people are doing, express gratitude for what they do for the team, follow up on their life etc before / after the work of the conversation.
100% in or 100% out: I only respond to a message if I can give it 100% attention and time to write a thoughtful response. Sometimes it just takes a couple of minutes of focus, so I do it right away. Other times, I let people know that I will circle back. I don't say anything without explaining my rationale for it. It is easy to be misunderstood on chat, so extreme clarity becomes even more important.
Read for tone before hitting send: After I type a message, I read my message for tone to make sure that it will land well on the other person and have the desired emotional response.
Switch to richer communication formats after a few messages: If a chat debate goes beyond a few back and forths, I get on a VC, setup a meeting, or ask to start/share a document to collaborate async. Since a majority of communication happens via non-verbal communication having higher stakes discussions on VC or async helped have smoother discussions.
These changes got my chat personality much closer to who I am in person!