With turn-over rates in companies being what they are, I frequently end up with out of date contacts, most notably in chat channels. How (and when) do we move on, after a personnel change?

On internal-only channels like Slack or HipChat, I’ve had conversations where I was the last valid login remaining in the conversation. It presented the question: Do I delete the conversation and start a new one with the people who picked up the responsibilities, or just add them (the replacements) to the existing conversation? If previous chat is shareable, it makes more sense to add the new people to the existing chat. But if the new people aren’t actually replacements, are picking up only a portion of the open responsibilities, it can get… awkward.

Security becomes a concern. While we all know we shouldn’t share passwords in chat channels, we all know that we’ve seen passwords shared in chat, whether or not we were the ones doing the sharing. How much of the previous conversation should be shared, if any? Start with a clean slate, and leave all of the valuable decisions on the ground? Maintain the conversation and rename it to _OLD or _DEAD, start a new conversation with the new “project team” and just copy and paste any relevant sections from the _OLD convo into the new? Still a potential security nightmare.

Internal messaging (meaning the messaging from C-level management to employees) can differ greatly from external messaging (meaning, not just the official company line to customers, but also what C-level management is willing to be quoted as having said). If the existing chat has internal messaging that differs from current external messaging, I could get in trouble for sharing even snippets of the previous chat. Decision Logs kept in, say Confluence, would theoretically capture only the final decision on the topic, and who approved it.  They would have been scrubbed of things that definitely shouldn’t be shared, such as one VP calling another a “wimp” for not wanting to go “balls to the wall” on the latest product enhancement, and the Director of Business Development’s gang bang joke. And while it might be amusing to maintain the log of some of these, and possibly satisfying to share others with HR, that likely isn’t in the best interests of the project, or of the new people on the project. So. New convo. Right?

Sometimes the technology dictates that it has to be a new conversation, refusing to allow the existing one to be added to because a login or three has been deleted. Or the tech sabotages us in a different way, keeping the conversation going despite people in it no longer being associated with the company. This happens to me all the time on Skype, to the point that I had to delete my Skype account, losing all of my existing contacts and conversations, in part because the agency do-si-do had swapped people around so much, that I couldn’t maintain most of my convos, not and still maintain company privacy.