Slack Tips for Your Growing Company
Communication is hard. As your organization grows from 3 to 30 to 300, the lines of communication between people get increasingly complex. People feel overwhelmed with unnecessary information while transparency suffers since relevant information is buried.
Good thing there’s Slack. The days of urgent emails buried in noise are coming to an end. Although company chat has been available for ages, the problem of group communication has never quite been solved. One-to-one communication is great, but a lot of helpful information that doesn’t need to be private is lost to the rest of the company.
Have Conversations In Public
Slack defaults channels to being public, which means anyone at the company can join the conversation. This is great for fostering transparency. Even if you don’t need to be part of the conversation, there’s a lot you can learn just by observing how different departments interact.
The beauty of having cheap channels is that anyone can make one and invite all relevant parties. It’s a free market for Slack channels. The ones that have the most draw will pull people in through chatter or offline conversations. The ones that have no use will fade away into obscurity.
Search is an incredibly powerful tool in Slack. You can filter by time, sender, and room, which makes recalling something that was previously mentioned extremely easy. You can search through chat history and link to old messages by copying the link available in timestamp.
Public conversations are especially important for onboarding new people. They get a sense of who knows about what and get a chance to participate in conversations they otherwise would have no idea about.
Tag Relevant People
When you’re in a public channel with 50+ people, it rarely makes sense to use the @channel feature. @channel will push a notification to everyone. @here is usually more relevant during the work day, but it won’t buzz everyone’s phones. User groups are much better to tag since you can create custom names that only tag relevant people (e.g. @deploy-engineers).
At the same time, you want to make sure you have public conversations whenever possible. So make sure to talk in a public channel but @ tag exactly who you want to receive those messages.
Manage the Noise
Inevitably, you’ll join too many Slack channels with varying levels of relevance to you. There’s probably about three levels of relevancy when it comes to Slack channels.
Level 1: I need to respond soon if I’m tagged/I will check this periodically
These are the channels that are most relevant to getting your work done. You can star these channels and hide all other ones. When people complain about Slack being noisy, they usually have all channels they’re members of open at the same time. Star relevant channels — you’ll be glad you did.
Level 2: I’m rarely tagged and I check this channel once a day
If there’s a channel where you like to catch up, but don’t participate in the conversation I highly recommend using the mute feature. You’ll still see direction mentions in the left
Level 3: Why am I even here?
Just type /leave into the chat box to leave the channel. You’ll be better off.
Ad-Hoc Rooms are Awesome
Need to get in touch with 2+ people? Create an ad-hoc room and don’t worry about naming a channel. You can also star these rooms so they bubble up to the top.
Bonus: Slash Commands, Bots, and Integrations!
Slack runs deeper than chat.
Slash commands are available by typing / into any channel. You’ll see a list of commands and what they do. /collapse is especially for hiding (sometimes questionable) images in your Slack channels and maximizing the space left for text. /remind uses Slack’s built-in bot set reminders.
Bots can aid a lot of automated tasks or simply just be there for comic relief. Slackbot can set recurring reminders, or remind other people/groups at a set time. Hubot has a vast library of plugins that allow range from really useful to endearingly silly. There are other bots that are actively being developed to automate and integrate with other systems.
Integrations from various other services can be really useful, too. Twitter integration lets you know whenever your company/brand are mentioned. Other integrations let you know when bugs come in, contracts are closed, pull requests are created, and a whole host of other events.
Conclusion
Slack is continuing to build features that make business communication not only better, but also more fun. There are whole companies that are building tools that live entirely on the Slack platform. Although it won’t ever entirely replace email, internal company communication is a much better place because of Slack.
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