Slack is a powerful tool that many organizations have used to replace email. Knowing why your organization has adopted this tool will add context to how you’re expected to use the tool as well.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to Slack. Each organization has its on requirements and remote culture.
Tips for Staying on Top of Your Work
While Slack can greatly improve communication across a company, it will only be as good as the way it is being used within the organization. If you don’t know how to use Slack effectively, here are some places to start:
Use Channels to replace distribution lists or contact groups for less formal communications. Slack can increase transparency across the organization since conversations can happen in larger “rooms”, regardless of team member location.
Use Direct Messages to reduce one-on-one meetings or phone calls, and free up focused work time.
Format Your Information
No one likes to read long chunks of text. At some point, the mind goes into overload zones out/starts skimming through content. To avoid this, and get your point across, do the following:
Use formatting to highlight key pieces of information. Use bold and italic text, include paragraph spacing as needed and bullet points, and embrace emojis!
Clearly identify who you need a response from and when. Use @mentions to specify the intended audience
Use boldtext to indicate a call to action. If there’s bold text, it means someone needs to do something!
Pairing Slack with links to documentation can change the entire culture of a company. By putting as much information upfront and some place where anyone can access it, you can reduce the number of questions you’ll need to field during the work day. Consider sharing links to things like:
FAQs
Project Plans
Company Goals
Glossaries/List of Commonly Used Terms
Team names/Org charts
How-to’s
When this becomes a best practice within a company, it opens up avenues for efficiency. Team members won’t need to wait hours for an answer to simple inquiries, and they can be kept up to date on what work is happening around the company.
Be Responsive
As a best practice, you should respond check Slack frequently and let folks know when you’re not going to be available. Recommend best practices around responsiveness are as follows:
Respond to all messages where you are tagged directly, or that use the @here or @channel tags.
If you can’t read or respond in the moment, snooze messages so you can respond later
Set your Do Not Disturb hours so that you are available during your working hours
