I agree, and disagree. Remember that context matters a ton. Are you posting in a company wide channel, or DM-ing you're close coworkers? Are you posting about an update, or just sharing something random to your team. All that plays into this more than the author expands on (he does quickly mention it in the last section). I think you just have to be a human, esp. in times where everyone is working from home. I think if you followed this advice in every channel, in every scenario, your company Slack culture would start to suffer a ton, and feel very cold (not that the author says that, just an FYI). This is good advice generally, don't get me wrong, but just be smart to when you apply it. Don't ruin your culture, and come off as a robot/cold person in every message you post.
agreed, really good point and I use “be nice twice” as a way to try to avoid it. The other aspect is I try to avoid participating in the “social media of work,” which I guess is like the resulting meta-community created by having work built in a Slack with text-based communication.
People get themselves into the dardnest trouble over a work Slack thread they just couldn’t drop.
> What I find the most damaging is the expectation that you should always be online watching all your channels in order to not miss some bit of information (or show that you are online, busy, doing work).
That sounds either like toxic work culture or maybe the way slack is used in your company has created assumptions that may not be entirely warranted.
Where I work, there is no such expectation. If it's something urgent, people use @-messages so the recipient gets a notification, with reasonable care not to abuse them. If it's anything else, it's normal messages which can be read when convenient. Some, including me, turn off Slack entirely when diving deep into some task but I still get phone notifications for @-messages and a couple of keywords I've set up for urgent matters. If people appreciate each others time and attention, it's actually a fairly pleasant tool to use. We're not a large team, though, maybe it's different in larger orgs.
> we use Slack all the time to facilitate our communications.
> Pro tip: set your notification settings to silent by default.
You're lucky that your company lets you treat Slack like an asynchronous e-mail inbox with multiple channels. If you have the luxury of ignoring Slack notifications until you're ready to respond, you're in a good place.
But your company isn't using Slack the normal way. The implicit expectation is that Slack is an instant messenger, and that you're expected to reply right now. That's why the default settings lean toward aggressive notifications, and that's why you need to take extra steps to turn them off.
Slack has been a powerful tool for remote work and distributed teams, but it's also an interruption factory by default. Before I left my last company, I routinely had 300-500 notification pop-ups per day as people shifted toward DMs and managers started abusing @channel to rise above the noise and get their answers ASAP.
>My point is that the emphasis is on using Slack as something other than chat, but that's really its main use case.
I see what you mean. I think of 2 styles of "chat" ... (1) a vacuous AOL AIM or Facebook Messenger style chat or (2) a business-related channel chat.
The (1) is replicated in Slack by abuse of DMs. However, the author didn't seem to be discouraging (2). (Author wrote at the top, "but ultimately, we decided we want to keep using Slack.")
What happens is many workers bring a casual "Facebook chat" etiquette to Slack which negates how meaningful business chat can work. That's why I didn't think the author wrote contradictory advice. (Similar to how the advice to turn off the phone ringer is not contradictory to the power of voice calls -- because sometimes one needs uninterrupted time.)
> If you make an effort to moderate it, it can be a huge asset to productivity.
Sounds good in theory, rarely works well in practice.
The only times I've seen Slack work well is when everyone involved starts with similar expectations about how it should be used and what's appropriate. In my experience, this is easiest to achieve when Slack channels are closely aligned with teams who are working together.
The model tends to break down when Slack is used for communication that is better served by e-mail, calls, or meetings. An easy rule of thumb is that if it crosses department boundaries and/or is something that needs to be formally communicated to an entire team, it's better to direct it to e-mail or a scheduled call.
> 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.
Strongly agree, but it's not just clients. Sales people, for example, love to use Slack because it's a backdoor channel to circumvent management and go straight to the engineers.
Personally, I find it more helpful to move the locus of control inwards and teach myself how to be productive in a diversity of circumstances. In this case, that would mean being more intentional about how I use Slack, and managing others’ expectations of their Slack messages to me. If you have a coworker who expects broad latitude to demand your undivided attention at a moment’s notice at any time, then that’s a problem that isn’t necessarily exclusive to Slack. More realistically, it’s fine if you batch Slack communications in your down moments like you would for any other communications (email).
> 2. Don't expect people to be online. It's the same as irc. If people are there, they are expecting to be interrupted / they are feeling helpful at that moment.
One of the reasons I don't like Slack is that people contact me when I'm off shift. I support APAC and so work different hours from most of my company. If I have a problem, I have to either email someone, or DM someone who isn't online. Either way, my voice goes into the black hole. Likewise, they return my DM in the morning, and their reply goes into the void if Slack doesn't wake me.
But with our corporate culture buying into the "always online" concept of Slack, I can't easily communicate how email-like it can be.
Slack isn't necessarily the problem in many situations. The problem is often how the tool highlights personal and culture problems instead of helping to smooth them over, by making them less evident. Email and other asynchronous communication can hide gaps in an organization by removing the pressure to respond immediately.
> When you start a new DM conversation on Slack, the proper etiquette is to send a complete message with enough information for your coworker to reply to or take action on.
The same might apply to articles with clickbait titles, like this one: Please have the courtesy to your readers to tell them what the article is actually talking about, so they don't have to click on it only to have their time wasted.
Also, this is a duplicate of a discussion from about a month ago:
When I read these kind of pieces I wonder if people know that just because your company has Slack, that doesn't mean they expect you to read everything in it.
Company wide/support channels, your basically at liberty to completely ignore these. Some people crack the odd joke in here, camaraderie in a team is nice, but don't feel its compulsory. I mute them, though they're are great places to be able to search!
The channel for your immediate team/specific projects, your not obliged to monitor this but it'd probably be helpful for the team if you checked in twice a day or so, you might be able to guide or unblock a teammate with knowledge they don't know you have.
And direct messages. Again, its up to your to triage these, if its unimportant just mark unread and come back later.
The important point of slack is that communication is open, which brings network effects, I cant count the number of times I've stumbled on information that's been directly helpful to me. However, just like any other open information portal, most of it isn't directed at you, so don't worry about it.
The best form of communication is ultimately based on the amount of shared context (Eg: acronyms), so it’s silly to create rules per the communication medium — slack, email, HN comments, etc. Even within a medium, a slack DM to a friend has very different shared context from a message to a company-wide channel. Being mindful of that, and communicating respectfully, regardless of the actual medium, is likely to be far more useful. Nothing special about Slack.
For me, respectful written communication also includes proper punctuation & capitalization — since it makes reading easier.
> Turn off all notifications except the unread messages count badge and check it when it overflows.
...then keep a straight face while your super Agile manager berates you in front of the entire team because you're hard to communicate with, we have Slack for a reason.
Not everyone has the choice to not allow Slack to interrupt you. Some organizations mandate this sort of communication, disruptive though it may be.
Edit: just to clarify, I'm not in this situation :-D. But I've seen it happening.
> Slack is best when you are just a drone on a project/channel (if that makes sense...).
> Slack also is great when the conversation is heavily one sided.
Honestly, that seems extremely unfair to me. It feels like you're using it wrong. In my experience, Slack is for conversations. The groups I'm in use it for tossing out random thoughts/questions... and people participate as they choose.
If you're using in a way where people are constantly pinging you demanding your attention, then you should change that. That's no different than being in a large office and everyone else feeling free to just walk over to you and tap you on the shoulder every time they want something. If _that_ was happening, it would be something you should fix, too.
I see your point and I agree with that, as long as it's not a metric, but the way you chose to communicate because it was best for the situation.
I've been on both sides of both situations (in person better, online better). But what I always did was: ok, feel free to interrupt me if something urgent comes up, otherwise, send me a slack with the full details and I'll answer later.
As mentioned in other responses to this post, having the number of emails/slack messages as a target doesn't help make the work environment better (in both 'more pleasant' and 'more productive' ways)
This. Also, I've muted all channels that I read to generally stay abreast of what's going on in the company but rarely to never need to actively participate in. And #random.
If you (or you and a group of allies) have the ability to influence your company's Slack culture, the following can help.
1) No one should ever @channel unless they absolutely positively need everybody's attention immediately that very moment. "The website is down! All hands on deck!" "There's a rabid raccoon loose in the office! Evacuate!" @here is slightly less awful but should still be used sparingly.
2) If you need someone's attention, @mention them. If you do require a group's attention, @here the appropriate channel. If you do this consistently, people can disable notifications for non-mentions and assume that any channel that has unreads but no mentions may be read at their leisure - instead of having to constantly keep up with dozens of conversations.
3) Use and teach people to use highlight words so they can get notifications of conversation topics that require their presence, and ignore other unread channels.
4) Set aside a channel or two for global or large-group announcements that aren't necessarily urgent. "We're ordering t-shirts. Tell the office manager what size you want." "Our phone system has a scheduled outage next Tuesday from 2-4pm."
5) The larger your organization and the busier your Slack, the more granular you need your channels to be. For instance, in a company of 5-10, you might have a single channel for all discussions of product, and another for sales, marketing, and partnerships. In a larger company you'll need to separate out channels for client vs server engineering; for engineering vs design; for engineering and design vs QA, and more. Don't make your designers try to filter out what content is relevant for them in a combined design and engineering channel or force your QA folks to ignore a whole bunch of technobabble in order to find the discussions that are relevant to them. Don't be afraid to break out project-specific channels too. If a conversation crosses boundaries, only then bring it to a more general channel.
I personally don't like living my life by chances (of overhearing important conversations, or anything). I do think small talks and self-start initiatives are important for work satisfaction. I will try to facilitate that by proactively reach out to coworker and probing around what they find interesting. I do that in on slack as much as or even more than in person.
There is this bot on slack called donut that every company I've been uses. Basically it prompts 2 or more random people to catch up every week or how often you think not annoying. I don't think I had more than that back in the office days but you could send slack messages to people how often you want if you like more.
In my team, most of the times, anything important needs to be sent to the channel for transparency and more chance of getting picked up. Private messages are not expected to be as important nor get an immediate reply so people won't feel bothered when you send one. Then there are also things more purposefully async such as github issues and wikis.
> Slack or not, online communication lacks etiquette.
Its probably you not them. If you dont like people message you about non work topics, just ignore their message or directly tell them that you are busy. They will get the message and stop being friendly with you.
reply