The History of Workplace Communication

By Victor Hoang · Updated Oct 24, 2026

The problem was distance. A decision made in one place had to reach people somewhere else. For most of history the only vehicle was a person on a horse.

Workplace communication, in the sense of managers and staff exchanging written messages about shared work, is older than any office. Rulers were sending dispatches by relay riders in Persia and Rome. Merchants were running firms by letter in medieval Italy. The internal memo only took its modern shape in the late 1800s. Everything in this story is an attempt to shorten the gap, then to cope with what arrived once the gap was short. The throughline is that every new channel, from the courier to the chat window, made messages faster and cheaper. Every one of them created a new problem: too much to read, and no agreed rule for when to answer.

This article is about the practice and the channels. The software built for shared work is told separately in our history of collaboration tools.

Timeline at a Glance

The Courier Empires (c. 1350 BCE to the 1st century CE)

Rulers learn that speed of news is power

Start in a palace archive in Egypt. In the second half of the fourteenth century BCE, according to the USC West Semitic Research Project, kings of other lands wrote to the Egyptian court on clay tablets, mostly in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the day. Local people found the first of these tablets in 1887 at the site of Akhetaten, and the collection now stands at 382 tablets, 350 of them letters. They carry gift exchanges, marriage arrangements, news from distant cities, and requests for grain, lumber and ships. The page notes the correspondence likely spanned only about 25 years.

That was a precursor, not workplace communication. The writers were scribes of rulers, the letters served a court, and nobody was managing a team. But it solved the problem every later channel solves: two parties far apart need a durable record of what each asked and promised.

The next step was speed. Herodotus, describing how Xerxes sent news home from Greece, wrote that the Persians posted men and horses along the road, each at an interval of a day's journey. In the Godley translation, the riders are "stopped neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness," and each passes the message to the next like a torch in a relay race. He gives the Persian name for the system, angareion. The idea was a standing chain of people, not one messenger riding the whole way.

Rome built a version of it. In his life of Augustus, Suetonius says the emperor wanted events in each province reported faster, so he first stationed young men at short intervals along the military roads and later used post-chaises, since the same couriers who brought dispatches could also be questioned. The same passage records a habit that would suit any modern inbox: Augustus attached to letters "the exact hour, not only of the day, but even of the night." A timestamp is a very old management tool.

The ordinary letter lived inside this machinery too. At Vindolanda, a Roman fort on Britain's northern frontier, excavators found hundreds of thin ink-written leaf tablets of birch or alder, discovered in 1973 by Robin Birley. One is a birthday invitation from Claudia Severa to Sulpicia Lepidina, wife of the fort's commander. Most of it was dictated, and a postscript was added in Severa's own hand. People in a military bureaucracy were already mixing official dispatch and personal note in the same medium.

Notice what these systems share and what they lack. Each served the state. None gave a manager a way to coordinate staff in the same building, and none made a message cheap enough for routine use. The new problem was cost: only rulers could afford the riders.

What it teaches teams today: a relay works when every handoff is clear. If a decision passes through five people, name who owns each hop, as the Persians assigned each rider a day's stretch.

The Merchant Letter (1300s to 1840)

Firms learn to run on paper, and the post gets cheap

By the late Middle Ages, trading houses managed distant branches almost entirely by letter. The Datini archive in Prato holds the papers of the merchant Francesco di Marco Datini (1335 to 1410), organized around his eight main warehouses, including Avignon, Prato, Pisa, Florence, Genoa, Barcelona, Valencia and Majorca. The archive's own account of its correspondence puts the total at about 150,000 letters, and describes it as the largest body of private correspondence in the world for the preindustrial period.

That was business by mail in the modern sense. Branch managers reported, asked for instructions and negotiated by letter, and the head office kept what came in. The new problem was the price of the channel. Into the nineteenth century, according to the London Museum, Britain's postal service was expensive and complicated, the recipient often paid, and the charge depended on distance and the number of sheets.

Rowland Hill, a teacher, published a reform pamphlet in 1837. The Penny Post that followed in 1840 made it one penny to send a letter anywhere in Britain, and led to the world's first adhesive postage stamp, the Penny Black. Cheap postage did not change what a business letter said. It changed who could afford to write one, and how often.

What it teaches teams today: when a channel gets cheaper, volume rises before habits do. Expect that, and set norms before the flood.

The Wire Age (1844 to the 1880s)

Messages outrun the messenger, then the voice follows

On May 24, 1844, Samuel F. B. Morse sent a message from the U.S. Capitol to Alfred Vail in Baltimore. Per History.com's account, Congress had financed the line, the words were "What hath God wrought?", and Vail sent the message back to the Capitol moments later. Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the commissioner of patents, suggested the phrase. For the first time a message traveled faster than anyone could carry it.

The telephone put the human voice on the wire. Bell's assistant Thomas Watson later wrote of hearing Bell say "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!" on March 10, 1876. The patent, titled "Improvements in Telegraphy," had been applied for on February 14 and was granted on March 7. The authorship of the invention has been disputed ever since, but not the date of the patent.

What turned an invention into a workplace tool was the exchange. On January 28, 1878, the first commercial telephone exchange began operating in New Haven, in a storefront in the Boardman Building. It started with 21 subscribers paying $1.50 a month. The switchboard George Coy built could connect up to 64 customers, but only two conversations could run at once and six connections had to be made for each call. By February 21 the first directory listed fifty subscribers, mostly businesses and services such as physicians, the police and the post office, and only eleven residences. The telephone arrived as an office tool first.

The new problem was interruption. A letter waits politely until someone reads it. A ringing telephone does not.

What it teaches teams today: a synchronous channel demands attention now. Decide which questions deserve a call and which can wait in writing.

The Memo Years (1850s to the 1920s)

Managers invent a form for talking down, up and across

This era overlaps with the wire age, because the same decades that gave offices the telegraph and telephone also gave them paperwork. The historian who explained why is JoAnne Yates. Her 1989 book Control through Communication, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, follows three firms: the Illinois Central Railroad, Scovill Manufacturing Company and E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, as summarized on AcaWiki.

Her article on the emergence of the memo, drawing on Du Pont and Scovill archives, concludes that the memo developed from the business letter. It did so, she argues, not because of any theory of writing but as a practical response to two things: new managerial theories and techniques, and changes in the technology of written communication. In other words, the memo is a management tool before it is a writing style.

The technology list is concrete. According to the AcaWiki summary of her work, Remington began making typewriters in 1874, and by 1890 about 33,000 people worked as stenographers and typists, many of them women. Carbon paper adapted for typewriters could make up to about ten copies, against two for older press copying, and vertical filing, which borrowed from the Dewey Decimal System of 1876, let a firm retrieve a document at random. Yates's view, as that summary puts it, is that filing by intended use created an accessible corporate memory. Horizontal messages between peers, rather than up or down the chain, are where the memo came from.

The problem this created is the one every office knows. Once copying was cheap, the number of pages grew, and so did the question of who should be on the distribution.

What it teaches teams today: a written format exists to give a message a clear owner, a recipient and a record. If your messages lack all three, no template will fix them.

The Inbox Age (1965 to the 2000s)

Mail leaves the mailroom, and chat arrives beside it

Electronic mail began as a convenience for a few users of one machine. Tom Van Vleck, who with Noel Morris wrote the MAIL command for MIT's CTSS time-sharing system in 1965, says in his history of mail that he knows of no documented computer mail that came before it, and that mail has probably been invented independently many times. Our history of email follows how it spread across networks.

Real-time chat grew up beside it. The 1993 specification for Internet Relay Chat, RFC 1459 by Jarkko Oikarinen and D. Reed, says the protocol was developed over the previous four years from a means for users on a bulletin board system to chat among themselves, and that the average number of users on the main network had grown tenfold in two years. Workplaces would adopt that style of talk much later.

The new problem was volume, and, with it, interruption. An experiment on interruption by Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues (2008), found that people completed interrupted tasks in less time with no difference in quality, but paid for it in more stress, frustration, time pressure and effort. The cost of being reachable was borne by the person being reached. Our article on async communication best practices covers the habits teams built in response.

What it teaches teams today: a fast reply is not free. People compensate for interruptions by working faster, and the stress is the price.

The Stream Years (2013 to present)

Team chat becomes the workplace, and video becomes the meeting

Slack came from a failed game. According to TechCrunch's history, the engineers at Tiny Speck built a messaging tool for internal use while making the game Glitch, and when Glitch's fate was clear they realized the tool could have value outside their small startup. Slack launched to the public at the end of 2013. Our history of collaboration tools covers the company in detail.

The incumbents followed. On March 14, 2017, Microsoft announced the general availability of Teams, its "chat-based workspace" in Office 365, available in 181 markets and 19 languages, with more than 50,000 organizations having used the preview since November. Chat had moved from a startup's tool to a feature of the office suite.

Then video. Zoom reported in April 2020 that the maximum number of daily meeting participants, free and paid, was approximately 10 million at the end of December 2019, and more than 200 million in March 2020. The wider shift to home offices is in our history of remote work, and the physical room those meetings replaced is in our history of the office. For how to run meetings well once they are on screen, see our guide to designing better meeting culture.

The problem of this era is one the Persians would recognize: a chain of people with no agreed rule for how fast each must pass the message on. Chat made every message look like an urgent one, and the questions of the earlier eras came back together. Who owns the decision? Where is the record? When is a reply due?

What it teaches teams today: the channel does not set the norm, the team does. Write down which channel is for what, and how quickly each one expects an answer.

Key People

Key Facts

Key Facts: Workplace Communication History

• The Amarna correspondence runs to 382 tablets, 350 of them letters, written mostly in Akkadian in the second half of the 14th century BCE.
• The Datini archive holds about 150,000 letters from a merchant who died in 1410, the largest preindustrial private correspondence in the world by the archive's own account.
• The first commercial telephone exchange opened on January 28, 1878 with 21 subscribers at $1.50 a month.
• Yates's research finds the memo developed from the business letter as a response to new management techniques and new writing technology.
• Zoom's maximum daily meeting participants rose from about 10 million in December 2019 to more than 200 million in March 2020.

The Pattern Behind the History

We call this the Faster Channel Pattern. It is our own synthesis of this timeline, not a published model.

1. The state or the firm builds the channel first. Persian relay riders, Roman couriers and Datini's letters all served rulers and merchants before anyone else.
2. Cost falls and ordinary use follows. The Penny Post, the telephone exchange and the typewriter widened who could send and how often.
3. A format appears to tame the flood. The dated letter, the directory, the memo and the carbon copy all gave messages an owner and a record.
4. Speed raises expectations. The telephone's ring, email's inbox and chat's red badge made waiting feel like a failure.
5. Norms lag the tool. Every era arrived before teams agreed how fast to reply.

What It Teaches Teams Today

• Name an owner for every message that matters. The memo exists to give a decision an author, a reader and a record.
• Match the channel to the urgency. Call for what is urgent, write for what is not, and say so.
• Treat reachability as a cost. The interruption research shows people compensate by working faster, at the price of stress, a thread the history of workplace wellbeing and burnout follows.
• Agree reply times by channel. A rule that chat answers within the hour and email within the day removes a great deal of guesswork.
• Keep one record. Dating a message by the hour, as Augustus did, is a habit worth keeping.
• Place this in context. For the long arc see our history of productivity and our history of knowledge work, and for the human skills behind good exchange, our article on communication.

Every channel in this story arrived faster than the habits to use it well. The teams that do best are the ones that decide, in plain words, who owns a message, where the record lives, and how soon an answer is due.