Getting the Most Out of Slack

Simple rules for how to leverage its full potential as a team.

Slack is a fantastic communication tool that has become the defacto standard among modern teams working in the tech industry. It has many, many great features that add efficiency, clarity and convenience. But in order to full unlock its potential and prevent the tool itself from becoming an obstacle, it requires a collective code of conduct for everything to run smoothly.

Why and When

Before we begin talking about how to use Slack, let’s talk about why to use it at all and when.

Set Expectations

There are often three main communication options available: email, chat (i.e. Slack) and talking in person. Picking the right would depend on what kind of response time you expect. While Slack is a great tool, it’s not the right tool for every job. Teams should consider which tools are the most appropriate and why, then agree to follow a code of conduct that sets expectations according. One such frame might look like the following example:

• Email—A response is expected within 24 hours, or more for lower priority issues. Use this to avoid cluttering Slack with messages of longterm importance that would otherwise become buried in a chat history.
• Chat — A response is expected as quickly as within few minutes but making exceptions for recipients who are busy with meetings, traveling, lunch, etc. Most of the time responses should come within a few hours and at by end of day at the latest. This sweet spot makes it good for handling of day-to-day issues while collaborating or seeking information.
• In person — A response is expected right away, i.e. someone should drop what he or she is doing and help. Use this one sparingly in order to not disturb someone.

There are of course exceptions and other considerations, including the contents of the message or the need to have a conversation in person to clarify a complex issue. But in general, this rough guide could help make sure that efficiency is maintained by preventing the wrong option from being selected.

Don’t Ignore Messages

Once expectations for response time are put into writing and widely accepted, the whole team then takes on the responsibility of responding according to expectations. Failure to do so may leave some feeling ignored. Sure, you may be busy. We are all are. But Slack interactions should sometimes be modeled after in-person interactions in order to be most appropriate.

Consider: If a colleague came to you desk with a question while you happened to be overwhelmed with high-priority tasks, you would most likely respond politely by saying, “Sorry, can we talk later? I’m swamped.” You would, of course, never just ignore that colleague, staring at your screen and not reacting to the noises they were making. Why? First of all, it’s rude, and you’d be rightfully branded as a sociopath. But more importantly, it’s poor communication. Keep that in mind when you see Slack messages waiting for you. The best thing to do in this situation is almost exactly what you would do in person: Let them know that you’ve read their message and tell them that you will get back to them as soon as possible. You can write this as a response message, or simply use an emoji. I like to use 👍 or 👀, but almost anything works.

Prioritize Others

Another general way to improve communication is to try to prioritize the needs of others over your own. This may sound like you’ll fall behind, but everything balances out in the way that your teammates are now prioritizing your needs, as well. This helps keeps blockers and other issues from forcing anyone to sit idle and in general is a more pleasant way to interact. That is, better that everyone is competing to help the entire team get ahead rather than competing to get ahead as an individual.

Profile Information

Your profile should include your full name, first and last. Your screen name should be the version of your first name written exactly you expect to be called in the office. If you go by Kate, write Kate. Don’t write Katheryn. Also include your job title, department or other relevant information about who you are and what you do at the company. This helps people get to know more about you and it also makes you easier to find in the direct message list. You may need help from someone in marketing, payroll or engineering, and now there’s a handy way of finding the right person.

Photos

Photos should be recent, accurate and clear. It helps if your photos also has the same hair style or same pair of glasses that you wear now. It’s very important and its selection should be done with professionalism in mind. This is not the place to put something silly, ironic, artistic or otherwise. It’s especially important for growing companies that frequently have new joiners. Slack then becomes a directory of names and faces that can help everyone figure out who’s who. Not only does this make your organization run smoothly, it helps avoid the embarrassment of forgetting someone’s name because you can easily look it up.

Status

Setting a status for yourself lets your colleagues know your availability and your location. This allows them to make correct assumptions about your responsiveness and if you are the right person with whom to speak. For example, if you see that someone is sick or on vacation, you know they are unavailable today and seek help elsewhere instead of waiting on them. Likewise, you will already know when someone is working remotely instead of trying to find them in the office.

Priority Hints

You and your colleagues will be receiving messages all day long. It’s going to be a challenge to respond to every single one of them in a reasonable amount of time. Knowing how to sort messages by priority is an important skill and everyone can help each other do it by dropping hints. These simple qualifiers can be added to your messages do to just that:

• “When you have a moment…”
• “FYI…”
• “No rush, but…”
• “I’m blocked on this.”
• “We’d like this ASAP”
• “…before EOD”
• “…before we go to lunch.”

Get Right To It

Slack can be very conversational, but sometimes it functions a bit more like email when someone’s schedule causes them to be away from their phone or computer throughout the day. In these cases, it’s best to avoid writing something like “Hi Nancy” and waiting for her response. Whatever you need to ask her or to let her know, you should get right to it in the first message. This will help Nancy balance the priority of this message versus all of the others to which she wants to respond. Some out there feel so strongly about this that there’s even a little website wholly dedicated to this message: http://www.nohello.com/.

Avoid Stream of Consciousness

After an hour-long meeting, you open up your MacBook to find there are twelve messages waiting for you in Slack. My first instinct when I see this is to think, “Wow, I missed a lot,” or, “Oh shit, something’s gone wrong.” Most of the time, however, it turns out to be some well-meaning colleague who has written eleven of those messages because he or she is essentially thinking out loud as they type. Something like this:

“Hi”—“How are you?”—“I have a question for you.”—“Do you remember that feature we built last year?”—“I was wondering if we can make a few tweaks to it.”— “Should be pretty easy.”— “Here’s a link to the new specs.”—(link)— “Thanks.”—“Talk to you soon!”—“😄”

The twelfth message—which, by the way, contained more or less the same content—was packaged into one well-composed paragraph that handled all the pertinent topics—including pleasantries—in a single message. The lesson here is to consider the delivery of your message(s) and spend a a few extra seconds to concisely compose something complete instead of bombarding the recipient with these kinds of thinking-out-loud fragments.

Reminders

This last topic isn’t so much about code of conduct, it’s just to point out an incredibly useful feature of Slack that some people don’t know about. For any message that you receive, you can quickly and easily set a reminder about it for an appropriate duration of time. This is great for keeping track of messages from people who may be waiting for your help. Just right click to bring up the context menu and select “Remind me about this”:

When the timer is up, you’ll get a message from slackbot that lets you easily link back to that message. This is nice because you may since continued a conversation with someone and the original message is buried in the chat history. Now it’s easy to get right back to it exactly when you need to.

Conclusion

With these fundamentals, you and your team and now prepared to use Slack like professionals, getting all the efficiency and convenience that it promises. But since every team is different, these guidelines can and should be customized and extended to match the company culture and business goals at hand.

Happy Slacking!