Using Slack for Humans
By: Ej Etherington
Tags: Slack, Remote Team, Remote Working, Slack Tips And Tricks, Remote Work

Moving from an office culture to a fully remote culture, especially when you were forced to do so, can lead to sense of disconnectedness and loss of interaction that many use as their primary way of gaining context and knowledge in an office setting. This past year many of us were thrown into remote culture and organizations often weren’t setup with the tools to create a strong intentional remote culture. In-office culture, while working remotely, does not translate to a healthy remote culture but it’s never too late and culture is contagious.

(Slack here could mean any chat client)

Remote vs In Office

There are several particular types of in-office behavior that, often mourned, can easily be mitigated by some simple shifts in the use of tools like Slack.

Drowning in DMs and Notifications

Can’t see how people are feeling

Loss of the ‘hallway’ track conversations

Missing support and humanity

Decreased visibility and alignment among teams

Text tone fail

Team morale

Communication Breakdown

In and Out and Notification Times

(A)synchronicity

Slack is challenging and distracting because it comes with all the urgency and synchronicity of human conversation but with many of the pitfalls of text communication like email

In the office, folks can bug you anytime you’re at your desk too right? So why does Slack feel worse sometimes?

Missing visual cues!

Imagine you walk up to someones’s desk and they look super busy, they are clearly working hard and focusing, or maybe there is somebody already there collaborating with them? Is your question super important? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t but you are able to see the cues and make a choice. Slack does not provide you with that context. When you message someone you don’t know what fires they are fighting or who else is messaging them at the same time.

Many of us have hygiene around email. Maybe you set aside time in the morning or every few hours, or maybe you mute it while you’re heads down. Why shouldn’t Slack be the same.

Shifting expectations and treating Slack as an asynchronous communication tool can help everyone lower their stress, improve focus and decrease context switching. How can we facilitate this from the sender and the receiver?

Context First

As the sender of a message, consider what you need and provide context. If you _need_ an immediate response, say so. If you do not, say so. Give the context up front so the receiver of the message.

Consider the following message:

Jack:

Hey, Good morning!

The ultimate distraction! As the receiver of the message you have no way to know if this is the prelude to an important conversation, a friendly greeting, do they need you to respond right away? What does it mean? You are forced, by the lack of information, to respond to find out. That forced you to context switch and lose focus. Context switching can cost you as much as 40% of productivity and the global economy $450 billion a year

Consider another message:

Francis:

Hey, Good morning! I’m working on the TPS reports and found a few discrepancies. I’d like you to take a look at them when you get the chance. I’ll need your review by Friday afternoon so no rush

This message provides all the information you need, as the receiver, to act appropriately, but it is small enough that it likely did not require context switching. Francis conveys the message with no expectation of an immediate reply, you get to choose when to engage without any further distraction.

An advanced pattern can take the form of a reaction emoji. A 👍🏻 reaction will let Francis know you’ve seen it.

Q: If you’re going to use slack like mini email, why not use email? A: Why not indeed. Slack is just one way to send a message and this is only a strategy to use Slack in a less disruptive way.

Slide Out of your DMs

Slack, for better or worse, is a place where conversations happen, decisions are made, context is stored. It is a useful archive if we treat it that way.

One way this is useful is as a self serve information buffet.

Lets say, for example, Jan and Micah are talking working together and found what they think is an interesting corner case bug about the application they are working on. They want to consult someone about it so they DM Alex who shows them that it is a local configuration error with an unhelpful error message instead of a bug. They say “Thanks” and move on. Two months later, a new hire finds the same message, asks Jan about it. Jan, long since forgotten the issue only recalls the Alex helped them and sends the new hire to talk to Alex and the cycle repeats. What if Alex is out that day?

What may have gone differently here if Jan and Micah could have asked for help in a public channel:

Alex’s DM load would be reduced. Alex may not have been the only one who could help and let Alex work.

In a team which uses public channels you increase the likelihood of getting your question addressed

Hidden struggles. Maybe Dakota had the same issue and had spent all afternoon looking for the answer, was stuck but didn’t want to bug anyone.

Putting information in public channel helps others

Accuracy. If Alex solved their problem, but it was the `V1` configuration and they should use the `V2` configuration

Sharing new information in public increases the likelihood of finding accurate information and exposing expensive inaccuracies

Searchable Archive. That new hire, instead of walking up and down the communication tree, could have searched the error message and found their answer in the Slack history

Public channels are a searchable archive

Healthy teams use public channels over private channels over DMs. The more folks can find information on their own, the less disrupted and more functional the team is overall.

Advanced Patterns:

Use threads to scope public conversations without clogging the main channel. Use `Also send to channel` when the topic is resolved to capture the outcome (if there is one)

Use a public channel as a record of decisions and discussions had on Zoom or Slack to complete the archive

Mark decisions with a particular emoji. (I like the gavel) You can search on that emoji and find all Slack decisions

Q: Shouldn’t that information just go into the document store (confluence, wiki, etc)? A: Maybe, but small things are unlikely to get their own page and that page is unlikely to be maintained. Think of Slack as your edge cache. Q: What about when I get a DM that should be a public conversation A: Redirect it to channel, create a thread, copy any important context and run with it.

Oh the Humanity

Remote work boils down almost all of our interactions to a literal API call. It makes robots out of all of us. We are #not-robots ! We are all humans (Except Chris maybe).

In the office, you can see the happiness, frustration, weariness, joy on the faces of your work mates. In the office, it is easier not to feel like you are alone on the the struggle-bus that day. When you don’t have that feedback and all you see is your peers silently producing high quality work it’s easy to forget that they also forgot a semi-colon and spend 2 hours looking for it or that they, I don’t know, are feeling really weary because there is a global pandemic and they really love the holidays but the state just went back into lock-down and they just had to tell their 90yo grandmother that they couldn’t visit that year and it’s really hard to focus on their Jira ticket because of all of it

Being remote doesn’t mean all that is gone but it does sometimes mean you have to find new ways of creating and maintaining the human connection that we all have. Building and sharing empathy and trust is a hallmark of high performance teams.

One strategy to open the path to empathy is a #not-robots Slack channel to share those moments. Even if not everyone is comfortable sharing, it can mean a lot to remind each person they are not the only one who makes mistakes, has struggles, and, has bad days

Communication Breakdown

Text is hard, you will get it wrong, it will be misunderstood, the response may shorter than expected, or take a long time to come back.

Text Tone Fail

Consider the following:

You ask your boss if its alright for you to take a day off next week.

They respond:

K

As the sender of a message, taking a little extra time to communicate can save you a lot in the long run. Consider a longer message with a more overt tone to ensure that your response includes more than a brusque single letter response with punctuation:

Hey! Yep, no problem! Have a great long weekend :D

Go out of your way to add tone hints, including gifs and emojis. It will help ensure complete communication and fight off the robots and build a more human, empathetic tone.

As the receiver of a short brusque message, it’s you’re responsibility to act with empathy and assume best intent. Maybe your boss is swamped, triple booked for 13 hours that day, but really wanted to make sure you got your answer OR if that reply never comes, it’s your responsibility to fight off any negative conclusions.

The better both parties get at this practice, the more empathy, the fewer challenges, them more functional the team as a whole.

Talking in Circles

You’ve just spent 25 minutes you didn’t have, typing in Slack with some one who, you are pretty sure, is saying the same thing you are saying, but why can’t you seem to agree? 😔

Slack is a great tool, but it is inherently limited in what you can do with it. That’s where Zoom (or your favorite video conferencing software) comes in. If you find you are repeating yourself, or you are getting frustrated, or you just can’t seem to get on the same page, get on a Zoom to communicate and collaborate.

Once you’re done there, jot notes in the thread in the public channel and send the roll-up to the channel so other’s can share the outcome.

Managers

Now that you can’t see your team on the regular, how often are you wondering to yourself

What is going on with my team?

What do they need?

How can I help them?

Where are the inefficiencies and blockers?

How is team morale?

You can probably already start to see how redirecting DMs to a public channels and threads can give you better visibility into team health without having to bug them and disrupt their daily work.

Over time, you can take the temperature of the team and team members based on the relative engagement of the team members and the quality of their communication.

Consider this. You have a team member who is ordinarily very vocal in Slack, uses light hearted tone, reaction emojis, and gifs. They are usually very quick to empathize in #not-robots but lately, they are more terse, their tone is shifting. That should set off your Spidey-sense, that person needs a check-in to make sure they aren’t burning out or going through something.

Chances are you’ve been using similar indicators in-person for years. They still exist in a healthy remote culture too, but you need to develops new ways of finding them.

Other Tips and Tricks

As your skill with Slack level up and some other tips and tricks become useful

Ever @mention’d someone only to remember too late they were on vacation or that it’s 4am on the West Coast and they got notified so they respond and you feel bad because it wasn’t important?

#in-out channels where folks tag in/tag out lets other users know when it is kind to `@mention` another user

Ever want to mention some one but don’t want it to notify them if they have their name set as a Keyword?

Use a leading underscore so you can give them a shout out, without shouting _at_ them

Example: “I was talking with _Robin the other day and they have some really cool ideas for the product. I’m excited for their presentation this afternoon”

Conclusions (tl; dr)

1. Take the time to put details and expectations into your first message

2. This work best when you don’t _expect_ an immediate response

3. More public communication is better for everyone

4. Use Slack as an archive

5. We are #not-robots and it’s good to talk about it with other humans

6. Use lots of words, emoji, and gifs to bolster your tone

7. When in doubt assume the best

8. If you cannot, get on a call

9. Managers! You can do this, the signs are there

More Sources

* https://slack.com/resources/using-slack/slack-remote-work-tips

* https://www.ahoyteam.com/read-guide-online#Section-4

* https://dispatch.m.io/slack-best-practices/