Creating a Slack Writing Etiquette Guide for Your Workplace

This resource first appeared in issue #15 on 20 Mar 2020 and has tags Managing A Team: Other, Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools

Creating a Slack Writing Etiquette Guide for Your Workplace - RC Victorino, Slab

This is a great overview on using Slack well in a workspace. Like so much, whether the tool is used effectively or not comes down to setting clear expectations, and it’s our job as manager to set and communicate those expectations.

The points the article makes strike me as dead on, although it took me a while to come to these realizations myself (in particular I hate hate hated Slack threads when they were first introduced, and in my dotage it took a while to get used to emojis, as reactions or otherwise). The point about not using on Slack for synchronous communications as opposed to ephemeral communications I think is exactly right and wildly non-obvious.

Make sure your messages are well written and have needed context
Don’t use it for synchronous communication - use it for ephemeral communication (stuff that doesn’t need to be kept) but asynchronously, like quick emails
Use channels well - have channel descriptions and purge no-longer-used channels regularly
Be sparing with group DMs - are you sure none of this conversation would be useful to someone else? You can always create a channel and purge it later
Use threads so as to not derail a channel
Have one or more non-work channels to keep the other channels work-focussed
Use reactions as acknowledgements
Use emojis to make up for lack of body language/facial expression