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A Remote Company Survival guide for Slack

Remote communication is hard. Duh-doi! And doubly so when your remote team comes from different cultural backgrounds with widely diverging expectations of how to communicate.

But it doesn’t have to be THAT hard.

Over the years, I’ve collected a series of tips and tricks that make Slack communication more bearable and productive.

I launched this set of communication guidelines at Vowel and the impact has been a much smoother day-to-day experience of communication, as well as an easier onboarding for new employees, and that’s saying something, because we work across 9 different timezones and significantly more cultural backgrounds. Norming about how we communicate and staying on the same page there has been so helpful in the ease of our day-to-day. Makes working at a startup barely feel all that startupy freneticism.

Note: This survival guide is targeted first and foremost at the organization: how can you ensure that the organization is being productive and has good communication. If you’re in a position to care about that, and in a position to do something about how your organization uses Slack, this is for you! If you only care about personal productivity and well-being, this still has some juicy tips. Check them out!

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Tip 1: Managing urgency

In Slack, everything can feel urgent, so set expectations with your team, in writing, that things are NOT always urgent. Encourage people to join or leave channels as relvant to them, to keep their notifications off when their not working, and go into “Do not Disurb” mode as needed. Slack is an ocean of messages cascading over each other, and your employees need to know they don’t have to stay abrest of every wave. Make sure you have a way to communicate that something is urgent (like sending a DM to draw someone’s attention somewhere), and coach the team that otherwise, it’s NOT urgent.

The more you make most things not urgent, the better your team can perform in their day-to-day and react swiftly & effectively when things ARE urgent. A rubber band that’s pulled taught all the time has no more elasticity to stretch when something dramatic comes up. Give your teams some… slack in how they Slack so you can use that slack as needed when urgent things come up.

Here’s a breakdown of how Slack notifies people & how easy it is to find the information. More urgent messages should use forms higher on the list (more dramatic notification). Less urgent messages should use forms lower on the list:

1. DM threadstarter < this will give the other user a red badged number, and they won’t have to sift through other content to find what’s causing that.
2. @mention/@channel in a channel threadstarter < this will give the other user a red badged number on the channel, but they may have to scroll around a bit to find what that is.
3. @mention in a channel thread reply < here a user will get a red badged number in their Threads feed, but they may have scroll past other thread replies they want to keep “unread” and respond to later.
4. @here in a channel threadstarter < this will give a red badged number to any user who us currently online and in working hours. But if they weren’t online at the time, that badge will never surface.
5. DM Thread reply < This will notify in the threads feed, but will NOT increment the red badge on the DM itself. Beware!
6. Channel thread reply < This will add a red dot (not a number) the threads feed
7. Channel threadstarter < This will make a channel show up on a sidebar (for users who have “Show channels with new content only” enabled) and be bold. Less attention grabby, but people will get to them for channels they care about.

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Tip 2: @mentions

A key part of making Tip #1 work is making sure people have good @mention etiquette at your organization. If you need a specific someone to read something, @mention them. If you need a specific someone to respond to something, @mention them and ask them for what you need (and when you need it by). If you need everyone in a channal to read or respond to something use the @here (if it only matters now) or the @channel (if the request is relvant to everyone no matter when they are online).

Make it clear that if you ask someone for something and there’s no @mention, then the request isn’t valid. No one can get upset about a missed “deadline” for response that didn’t include an @mention of some sort. This will give everyone confidence that if they don’t have a little red number badge on a channel, then there’s nothing they are *expected* to look at.

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Tip 3: Public by default

Now that your team knows things aren’t urgent all the time, that they don’t need to read every message in every channel, you don’t need to hide messages in DMs or private channels. Use public channels for all non-sensative communication.

Here are the reasons communication can benefit from being public:

1. When you realize you need to ask a third person for their input, you don’t have to copy/paste and re-explain. Re-explaining costs time, can result in errors, or can skip over some context you think isn’t relevant, but would give that third person a great idea that you couldn’t predict.
2. When searching for related information, a person not involved in that conversation can happen upon your discussion.
3. Someone not involved in the conversation may see something that catches their attention and pulls them in with relevant insight you didn’t know to seek.
4. You can keep the urgency level to the appropriate level. While it’s true, participants don’t get automatically notified of every message in a Private Channel, they DO get notified for every.single.direct.message. Sending notifications is your way of saying “this matter a LOT right now, please, please, please pay attention.” When you have a lot of non-urgent DMs flying around, you’re asking your team to pick between not having much focus for their work and not being responsive when they are urgently needed. Neither of those are great. Do your team a favor… don’t make it a DM unless it’s sensitive (or you’re drawing their attention to something urgent in a public channel).

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Tip 4: Thread! 100% of the time

Did you know that you can take any channel message and click “Reply in thread”? This will save you and your team so many headaches. (Quick terminology check in: I call every “top level” message a “threadstarter” and every reply a… “reply” or “thread reply.”)

Are you writing a reply to a message? Is that message in a channel? Reply in the thread! You may think “Oh, this won’t be a discussion, it’s just a quick response, I’ll just add it to the channel.” But then a third person has a response. Do they add it to the channel too (adding more mess!) or response in a thread to the original message? Or respond to your message and start a thread off of that reply? It quickly becomes a hot mess. Now, this may not happen every time, but it could happen any time. So avoid this issue altogether by making it a thread to start!

Why? Here are my top three reasons:

1. Keep channels clean, so other people in the channel can discuss something else simultaneously. It’s literally multi-threading. One of the best ways to increase the parallel efficiency of a team.
2. Make it easy for people who join in the conversation mid-way understand the boundary of what they need to read to get the context.
3. Ensure that involved people get notified of responses. This is especially critical when you’re working across timezones. You ask a question, someone replies in the channel several hours later (without @mentioning you). You don’t get a notification because it’s not threaded to your question, and because you’re not treating slack like an urgent read-all-the-things stress zone you don’t see that reply for a day or two. Major work slow down!

A quick note on threading in DMs…. I don’t encourage it. DMs only add to your notification badge number when they are threadstarters. All DM thread replies are washed into the threads notification feed, which is much harder to navigate through and manage than a DM.

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Tip 5: Compose messages for the reader

A friend described this to me once: In database design, you can choose to make it really easy to read the data from the database (but hard to write) or you can make it really easy to write to the database (but a little harder to read). It’s exactly the same in Slack messages. As you compose a message you can choose the message that’s easy to write or the message that’s easy to read.

If you’re in a public channel, spend a little more effort to make it easy to read. Why? Cause significantly more people are going to read it than write it, so in terms of total organizational efficency, you should spend a little more time composing it be as legible as possible to all the readers.

What makes a message easier to read?

1. Fewer words. Take the time to edit down, be concise, find precisely the right word so you don’t need to use a 5-word phrase. The famous quote from Mark Twain applies equally to slack messages as letters: “I’m sorry for writing you such a long letter. I didn’t have time to write you a short one.”
2. Rich formatting. Call out things that matter in bold and/or italics. Drawing a point about two parallel items? Highlight each of those items as bold. Drawing a point about two sets of parallel items? Bold the first set, bold & italicize the second set. Think about rich formatting as a way to add dimensions to your communication that rely on the much stronger human visual skills vs the weaker human linguistic skills.
3. Ordered lists. Did you use an unordered list (bullet points)? I applaud you for adding some visual consideration to your communication. Now, take it one tiny step forward and change those bullets to numbers. Why? It’s very, very easy to reply “re #2, here’s a thought” vs “in regards to your point about how long we should wait before we announce…” This is even more important when more people are involved in a back-and-forth. The correct answer is almost ALWAYS a numbered list.
4. Relevant links. But remove their previews. Again, keeping messages visually short is the best way to ensure that people will read (and understand) the whole thing. I find link previews to be 99% a waste (exception: if the preview allows the user to access information like a Loom recording you can play from the preview). Instead of adding the naked link, select the relevant word or phrase of the message and add the link to that.
5. Consider language divides. When working across langauges (Vowel has employees with 6 different first languages!) you need to give extra consideration to word choice. Re-read your message and ask yourself “Are any of these words or phrases idioms or idosyncouistic uses that only a native speaker would know? Find alternatives! Typically avoid more metephorical word choice and get more specific, technical, and occasionally more verbose.
6. Advanced mode: Don’t make people do any “Type 2 Thinking.” Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky did some incredible research on how our brains process information and found that there are two types of thinking (which they very ingeniously titled Type 1 and Type 2 thinking). Type 1 thinking is immediate, intuitive, obvious. Type 2 is arduous and requires what we commonly call “thinking” like math, logic, etc. Don’t ever ask people to use their thinking brains to read your message. Do the math for them, spell out the logical steps, illustrate everything to make the thinking all obvious and Type 1.

There you have it! 5 easy tips you can implement to improve your company’s day-to-day in Slack (or Teams! or HipChat! or any chat based work tool). I hope you found this helpful. If you have any tips or tricks of your own, please drop me a reply here (or on Twitter) I love adding to my collection!