Channels, @mentions and DMs in Slack — what’s the protocol and etiquette?
By: Harley Alexander
Tags: Productivity, Slack, Remote Working, Communication, Messaging

When do I make a channel and when do I @mention or Direct Message someone?

We all have them — people who abuse @mentions every 👏 single 👏 time 👏 they need something. This is hardly good etiquette! I’m sure we’ve all seen channels like #thursday-sensible-lunch and #friday-lunch-shenanigens . Wildly inappropriate!

Try these guidelines in your workspace for maximum productivity and reduce the amount of unnecessary cognitive load given to slack.

These guidelines and frameworks also apply to other chat tools like Microsoft Teams and Workplace by Facebook. The principles are totally the same!

When should you create a channel?

Over time I’ve noticed just five distinct reasons a new channel should be created. That’s it! Each has a specific purpose and each should get a certain level of your attention — adjust notifications accordingly.

#team — your team-wide channel

Use this channel for communications that need to notify everybody in your team. Use it as a place to host your stand ups, pass down announcements from higher up, check attendance and so on. Anything that you’d normally do as an entire team should live here. Needless to say, there should only be one of these per team.

#project — a channel for a specific project

Any time a new project kicks off, create a channel for it. This keeps all relevant communication, documents and artefacts in one place. Best of all, it’s a chronological recount of developments throughout the project. Use it to ask team members for help when you’re blocked so that there is a public record and other team members can benefit from the discussion. You can also pull in project specific integrations such as task boards for that project to keep everyone in the loop — even if they don’t open Trello, Asana or Planner as much as they should 😉

#ongoing-topic — a channel for ongoing learning, updates, etc.

A place for rolling updates around a specific topic where there is a lot of communication that shouldn’t pollute other channels. Some examples could be #covid19-response , #corporate-restructure , #javascript-learning and so on. Users can opt-in to this information if they find it relevant. Be sure to let everybody know the channel has been created in a team channel so people don’t miss out!

#integrations — a channel for integrating specific services to slack.

You might setup an integration for #power-bi that sends daily reports on website traffic to your workspace. If it’s not project specific, it’s probably something people want to opt-in to and be able to check when it suits them. Most integrations let you funnel notifications into specific channels. Use this type if you don’t want to mix discussion with integration notifications (though I wouldn’t recommend it).

#extra-curricular-and-random — channels for things unrelated to work discussion.

Examples would be #exercise , #bangin-spotify-playlists, #random , #news , #birthdays and so on. As slack puts it, these are places for “Flim Flam” and communication unrelated to work. You can even mix in integrations like PinPon — a favourite of mine — for keeping track of your highly competitive #table-tennis tournaments.

It’s important to have some level of discipline about where you ask people things. This comes naturally to most people and you’ll occasionally find the“Slack Police” telling people to please stay relevant.

Slack police staying on top of everyone

@mentions, DMs and the concept of synchronous vs asynchronous work

There are two distinct types of work that you perform all day, err day. Those are synchronous and asynchronous work tasks (yes, we’re borrowing this concept from programming). How you contact someone depends on what kind of work you’re doing.