How to Slack (in a good way)
Hi, I’m Sarah, a front-end developer working on the product list pages on johnlewis.com
At John Lewis we have many ways to communicate and collaborate with each other. Some have been around for years. For example, our in-house magazine, The Gazette, was first published in 1918 and still provides information to the entire company each week.
One of our newer forms of communication is Slack. I work in an area of the business that really embraces Slack. It is my first port of call for any communication and now I check my email inbox nearly as rarely as I check the post trays in the office! However some people have struggled to get started with Slack, finding it noisy and distracting. There are also some teams that don’t see a need for an additional form of communication, perhaps because they are unaware of how Slack differs from the existing tools they use.
I gave a talk at one of our Tech Profession conferences with the aim of explaining Slack to people who were unaware of it or new to it. I was really surprised by the amount of feedback, and requests to share the recording, that I received afterwards. It turned out that even some of our experienced Slackers appreciated some of the tips and analogies, so I thought I’d write them down…
The Art of Slacking
I think the key to understanding Slack is not really about what it is but more about how you use it. It is an art rather than a science. You will have different ways of using it depending on the situation and the people that you are communicating or collaborating with. This is the same as communication within the office environment. The way you chat to other members of your team in nearby desks is different from the way you request information from another team or make an announcement to a large group.
Slack is like a virtual office: All the people you communicate with are there and all the ways you communicate are there.
Your team
Back when we were all primarily office-based, the chances are your team all sat together. You’d say your “good morning”s, and catch up about your weekends, by your desks. Throughout the day, you’d turn to ask each other the odd question or have conversations about pieces of work.
In Slack, the place for those sorts of conversations is in a team channel. It’s best to make it a private channel, with only your team members in it. That way it won’t disturb anyone else.
Other teams
In the office, if you needed help from another team, you might walk over to their team’s desk area.
In Slack, teams have a public channel that is open to anyone to join. This is where people can post questions to the team. If it’s a team you talk to often, you might join the channel permanently. If not, you can leave the channel again once your query has been answered.
You might be reading this, thinking “but that disturbs the whole team when I only need one of them to answer my question” but it doesn’t really. Team members will check the channel whenever they have a moment. They’ll easily be able to see if someone else in the team has already replied or put an emoji reaction to show that they are looking into it. Some teams have processes in place to help with this e.g. taking it in turns to be the person responsible for checking the channel each day.
Do: ask questions in a team channel. This enables someone else in the team to answer if the person you would have gone to directly is on holiday or busy. It also leaves the answer there for others to find at a later date, in a place that can be easily shared and linked to.
Don’t: ask work-related questions in a direct message (DM). This means the conversation is hidden from others. This makes it harder if you find you need to pull other people into the conversation.
Do: get acquainted with how to use Slack’s search to see whether your question has been answered before. If you want to go back and find something you’ve read before, it’s easy to narrow down your search by the channel it was posted in and/or the person who posted it.
Collaborators
Sometimes we need to collaborate, either with people in our own team or from other teams, for longer than just a couple of questions. If a piece of work is going to involve lots of discussions then it is useful to keep them all in one place in a topic channel. That way all the people who need to be involved can join the channel and the information doesn’t get scattered across several channels.
Communities
We all belong to many communities, be that groups of people who do similar work to us, the departments we work in or the various sports and social clubs that John Lewis has. Many of these now have channels in Slack.
In the office, communities might have shared information by putting up posters and sending out mails. Now they can post in Slack.
Friends
In the office we would bump into friends around the office. We might stop for a chat by the coffee machine or lifts (or have a gossip in the toilets!)
In Slack, we can use DMs for this.
Everyone in the company
Ok, maybe not the whole company, but everyone with Slack access at least. For the rare occasions where you need to say something to everybody, there is the Announcements channel, which all our Slack users are a member of.
Don’t: use @here or @channel in the Announcements channel. That would be like doing a tannoy announcement!
Earwigging
In the office, if someone nearby was having a conversation that we thought might be useful to us, we could listen in.
In Slack you can do that by following a thread (Click `Get notified about new replies`) or joining a channel
Managing noise: don’t try to hear everything
In the office you wouldn’t expect to hear every conversation that happened. In Slack you can’t expect to either. You can’t approach Slack with a “clear the inbox” mentality. This is where the art comes in again. You need to play around with the settings for each channel and see what works for you.
There will be channels where you’ll want to receive notifications for all messages and some channels where you don’t want any notifications at all. There will be communities that you are active in and communities where you just want to dip in to catch up every now and again.
Actively curate your channels. Look at the notifications settings for each and change them whenever they aren’t working for you. You can also un-follow threads, or leave a channel altogether, if you’re no longer interested.
In the office, if it was getting too noisy, you might put some headphones on to block out all the conversations. In Slack you can pause notifications. Just don’t do it for too long and make sure you tell anyone that might need to contact you urgently. You can also temporarily update your status to inform people that you are unavailable and when you intend to be available again.
Managing noise: don’t be loud
As well as managing noise by controlling how we listen, we also need to be careful about how we make noise. Just like in the office, we need to be considerate when we communicate in Slack.
Prodding
In the office, we wouldn’t disturb someone who looked like they were in the middle of something or if they were talking to someone else. We wouldn’t prod them to get their attention anyway. That’s what @ feels like in Slack. The notification is disruptive and has a sense of urgency, causing the recipient to switch their focus to it immediately.
Don’t: use @ if the person is already in that thread or channel and is going to see the message anyway.
Don’t: use @ if you are just mentioning someone’s name in conversation.
Making a big entrance
In the office if you went over to another team’s pen, you wouldn’t make a big entrance and make sure you had the attention of the whole team before you spoke. That’s what it’s like if you use @here or @channel. All members of the channel get an immediate notification to “look at this!”
Don’t: use @here or @channel unless everyone needs to see it as soon as possible. If you’re asking a question in a team’s public channel, the chances are they will be actively monitoring it anyway. You don’t need them all (and all their followers) to have a notification flash up.
Threads
In the office you wouldn’t go to talk to someone and speak so loudly that others in their team are disturbed by every sentence.
Do: Use threads. This keeps all the conversation together and saves the people who aren’t interested in the conversation from getting a new notification for each reply.
Managing noise: but don’t be secretive
While you need to be considerate, don’t be too quiet. It’s best to keep work conversations out in the open.
Remember: direct messages are for gossiping!
At the John Lewis Partnership we value the creativity of our engineers to discover innovative solutions. We craft the future of two of Britain’s best loved brands (John Lewis & Waitrose).
We are currently recruiting for a range of software engineering specialisms and other roles.
