I guess I do not really understand the backlash at Slack. I think it is more of highlighting broken company cultures. If someone expects an immediate response for any communication does it matter if it is Slack, the phone, your office, your email (plus follow up email and/or phone call)?
For me Slack has cut down immensely on people randomly showing up in my office. Just forcing someone to write something down, and think about needing an immediate response cuts down frivolous questions. The biggest plus between it and email is that Slack pushes using public chats. I like this because I can go through during my work mental downtime and stay aware of other things going on.
My company basically uses slack as an improved email. We don't expect immediate responses unless we specifically tag someone and say ASAP or whatnot. Works out well.
I moved from a job with Slack to a job without Slack. Finding myself more productive. Some people use Slack but since I saw on the first day that it is not the main medium for comms I now outright refuse to use it anytime anyone mentions it. Nobody seems bothered and email, phone and in person is prefered. And we all (15 employees) regularly worked from home even before this situation.
I would agree with you, except that Slack promotes actively that culture of quick response and disruption.
And I indeed blame that most work cultures took that in blindly without reflecting on what the impact would be.
I see it as something similar to the rise of open-spaces. Now there is a backslash against it because people finally realize that it was overhyped and that open-spaces are maybe not always that good.
Regarding emails, I disagree with you. It is still my go-to channel for deep technical discussions on difficult subjects on which you need to reflect. With emails, I have no pressure to respond directly. When I respond, I will write multiple well constructed paragraphs where I explain why I would do this or this technical choice. Emails are archived easily and can be reread and referenced later.
Slack is a dumping ground of irrelevant messages, the opposite of your experience.
This reflects my experience. The people I work with now use slack exclusively for work and the odd share of more personal items while on vacation/weekend/walk during lunch. We have similar interests so the content is always welcomed. Any important discussion happens offline or on the phone, though. I can’t imagine us using slack for anything outside of trivial, asynchronous messages and events reported by bots.
At most other companies I’ve had people message me about salary concerns, unionization, anger towards a manager or CEO, endless banter about anything but work, etc. The main difference was that these places were run by people who really didn’t care about their employees and slack ended up a reflection of that. A lot of upset, frustrated, resentful venting in private channels.
If slack didn’t exist, these conversations would have happened some other way. There’s no way everyone could keep sane in a bad work environment without some degree of venting or comradeship.
I can understand the frustration with Slack but the comment about large companies using it doesn’t have much ground. I’m at a 3000+ employee company and slack works great for us. I think that one thing that has helped many people is to remember that you never have to reply immediately. Also, if you’re a stakeholder on something, then a final decision should not be made without your input. I’m sure that if you limit yourself to checking slack as much as you check your email, then it won’t be such an issue.
Personally, despite their declared mission, I see Slack as replacing phone calls rather than emails. It suffers the same problems than phone : people writing fast without thinking twice about what they say to have a chance to put their idea in the discussion, lost forever knowledge because searching slack is a mess, short and meaningless interventions in the discussion, etc. It is indeed to me better than phone, because you don't have to reply within 5 secs when someone tries to reach you, so it's less interruptive.
But for business sensitive discussions where we expect a lot of efficient brain time and valuable discussions, hell no, send me an email.
Tl;dr The main point of the article seems to be that Slack is a huge time sink that is no more efficient than email.
I have to agree. Slack has a lot of cool features but ultimately I don't have time for socializing during work hours or tracking the endless feeds. Although, in my experience, discussions on Slack do tend to be about work, the long trails of comments from every possible participant are overwhelming. At least with email you can easily limit the number of participants in a conversation.
All the options you mention are designed in order to reduce the main problem: that it requires synchronous communication. That is, after you "come back" from a meeting or being away, you can't just work in peace and when you want just send a reply: no, you are expected by design to engage in a conversation.
I'm not interested in engaging in a conversation at all unless there is something really extremely important that requires my undivided attention for a specific period of time. But when companies use Slack, they integrate it as a part of the culture. You are expected to be ready to answer. Sure, you can pause notifications - but you know people are waiting. Are you a good team member if people are asking questions and you are not answering?
For contrast, I found out that many people I worked with are too lazy to write an email and will prefer to solve the problem themselves rather than write to me if I don't answer soon enough. Which shows another interesting aspect of Slack-type culture.
Yeah before Slack I was constantly getting interrupted with questions that could have been answered any time and random co-workers just wanting to chat. However, I agree with the analysis that Slack is good for immediate communication and communication that doesn't really matter too much. Before Slack we didn't really have a tool that fit that and so every communication was a co-worker walking over and interrupting whatever you were doing.
I've never worked anywhere that didn't expect an immediate response from Slack. If they wanted a delayed response, they'd send an email.
Worse yet, if I try to enforce that myself by not responding, there is a whole conversation in the channel before I get there and then I have to respond to all the messages in a mess of threads or some big long response block.
Torn on this one. I'm sympathetic because of how the OP complains that he's been pulled into Slack because of its popularity. I don't think being virally popular is a demerit -- sometimes popular things are popular because they are good -- but the trade off comes when bystanders are forced into the hivemind if they want to do things that previously didn't require that hot-app-du-jour. And I've only used Slack as a social outlet, not in the workplace, so I can't comment how it compares to Hipchat or good old fashioned Gchat in overall trade offs in the workplace.
But this is where the OP totally lost me:
> In the olden days, you’d send around a group email. As things progressed, relevant people would be added to the email chain and irrelevant people removed. It wasn’t on trend and it might have been clunky but it served its purpose. If a person needed information from one specific person, they could contact them individually in the chain. Everyone could input ideas and get the issue solved. When the issue was out of the way, the whole thing could be shut down with a press of the delete key.
Those are some seriously rose-tinted lenses. Again, I haven't used Slack for work, but unless Slack is significantly clunkier than HipChat/Gchat, and the Slack client sends an electrical shock upon each message sent/received, I'm having a hard time believing that Slack is overall less pleasant than the email-chain-discussions of the past.
Ignoring the fact that the OP describes the most idyllic discussion-by-email-chain situation in this history of the universe when arguing why Slack chat is so inferior, the main flaw in his argument is that maybe his company has cultural communication problems overall that are exacerbated by features of Slack that are helpful to others?
Here's his main complaint:
Now try this in Slack. Remember, it’s one of 10 issues you’ll have in a day, so you start with creating a group chat instead of a dedicated channel. Now add someone. Yup. You’ve now just started an entirely different group chat. All the context of the conversation has gone and you’ve found yourself starting over, having to re-explain the whole situation for each new person added. You’ve also suddenly got a shitload of group chat windows open. Oh, and they aren’t named like channels, so which one of those four group chat windows you’ve now got open was it again? Oh shit. You got it right, but someone else didn’t. They’ve responded in the chat you were all using previously before you realised someone needed adding.
Sure, it's annoying to have to bring someone up to speed when inviting them into an ongoing conversation. Has the OP considered how fucking annoying it is to the person you've just forcefully invited into your conversation to read through several paragraphs/pages of pre-existing chatter to get themselves up to speed? It sounds like there are issues in Slack's interface that could be cleaned up, but the problem of new people being added into a group chat without being able to see the history is a feature that compels a few good practices:
1. Don't start a group chat for something that could be sussed out in a channel.
2. Don't start an important group chat without thinking of all the relevant stakeholders who might have input on the issue. Is it possible in Slack to invite someone into a group chat even if they're AFAIK (which would allow them to see the history of the conversation without having had to actively participate)?
3. For those situations in which you need to invite someone ad-hoc, make sure you can sum up the issue in a couple of sentences (e.g. "Hey Jane, Bob tells me you know about this [URL to Github issue]"). For situations in which the new person needs to know all of what you've discussed before and behind her back before you decided to rudely invite her to your chat, see Point 2.
agreed. I love Slack. where I work, it is used for helping coworkers/other teams with issues - but there is no expectation of fast replies. the author implies this expectation is implicit to Slack, but it's not. for me, it's perfectly normal to not expect a reply to something even on the same day, especially if it's complex and people are busy.
additionally, if the volume of messages is too high to be able to catch up with after working for a while (like you would catch up on emails), this is probably an issue of not splitting things up adequately into granular channels. or, again, some weird culture of just spamming Slack for everything.
In my experience, Slack doesn’t differ a whole lot from email. A lot of crud, some useful nuggets, and overall not great for making hard decisions.
Within the team, we use daily stand-ups. Start out with the normal “I did X, working on Y” stuff, try to get that done in 10 minutes (for a team of 6 + manager + occasional BA or tech fellow dropping in). The rest of the 30 min block is open to whatever the team needs - stuff that if left to Slack would end up being a multi-day game of telephone.
Outside the team, Slack is ok for starting conversations, but generally anything important or hard needs a live meeting, even if it’s only for a few minutes. We have a few channels that are exceptions, where the team that “owns” the channel is better than average at making well reasoned responses. But, that’s the exception and those teams are always a pleasure to work with. And this is in a reasonably well functioning mid-sized company. I hate to think what it’s like at a large company.
One thing I have not seen mentioned here is the “slack status”. I find that it has a subtle stress inducing effect:
* if it’s green are people expecting me to reply right away? And if I don’t respond do they feel anxious?
* do employees feel pressure to keep it green to show they are working?
I told my team that I will keep my status to AWAY always, and they can feel free to do the same. Just because slack provides a surveillance method doesn’t mean you have to use it. This also reduces expectations of immediate replies and keeps it more async
I guess we are in the minority. Slack has been awesome for boosting communication and collaboration in our department. It's effectively killed awful e-mail communication on issues.
Instead, we carry on live, highly-interactive communications. Everyone pretty much understands if you are busy, however, and don't respond immediately.
At this point most my emails are automated responses from companies. Slack on the other hand is people, that suggests that people want conversations that are more nuanced that just back and forth. Email certainly has its place, but it's not right for groups of people talking to each other.
Here's what this conversation always boils down to:
Slack is a tool, just like one of probably dozens you use in your day-to-day work. It doesn't set or enforce any guidelines for how it should be used. If left unchecked it has a tendency to amplify the worst parts of your company's culture. If you make an effort to moderate it, it can be a huge asset to productivity.
Speaking of the example in the article, there is absolutely no reason clients should have direct message channels with your company's employees and expect to get a response 24/7. This is true with email, Slack, SMS and every other form of communication.
The criticism I most often hear is "Slack expects me to be online all the time". No, YOUR COMPANY expects you to be online all the time. Slack can be closed with one click.
Slack is good for group messaging for a real time chat about an issue that will get resolved hopefully in the next few hours, coordinating lunch orders, posting random YouTube videos, news articles and memes.
There are focused channels on dealing with specific projects that can be productive. But those are lesser utilized.
The daily stand-up channel, only a couple people actually read them. For actual stand-ups, every one is checked out.
Slack is nice for a few things because email is useless with thousands of emails that are irrelevant. On the plus side I'm glad I don't have a work voicemail anymore.
At a previous company the owner would forward 30 minute recordings of a conversation, for 3 years I just deleted every voicemail. It actually never caused a problem. Every day I'd have 8-10 voicemails waiting, every day I just hit 7, 8-10 times.
People over communicate but say nothing important and it just adds noise.
I agree! Slack as a utilitarian tool is perfectly fine, in my experience. Not great, but fine enough to be a value-add as a communication platform for business purposes. However, I have found the working culture supported and implicitly enforced by Slack-centered organizations to be rather traumatizing to live with in the day-to-day. The availability of instantaneous, chat-like group communication has led to an expectation of instantaneous responses and giving _anyone_ in the org interrupt priority has completely destroyed my ability to do thoughtful, considerate work. This is not a Slack problem in origin, but the use of Slack is certainly loading and pointing a handgun at actual productivity in an org that uses it heavily for business.
I'm sure that there are plenty of organizations that have found ways to use Slack effectively where it fits. I have not yet found one.
For me Slack has cut down immensely on people randomly showing up in my office. Just forcing someone to write something down, and think about needing an immediate response cuts down frivolous questions. The biggest plus between it and email is that Slack pushes using public chats. I like this because I can go through during my work mental downtime and stay aware of other things going on.
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