How we Slack at Normative
It’s always interesting to see how other companies are using Slack. Taking a nod from the folks at FiftyThree, we thought we’d share how we use Slack.
At Normative, we’ve been using Slack for about a year now. When we first got it, we just turned it on and waited to see how people would use it. (Bloomberg wrote a bit about our experiment here.) Rather than let Slack be a free-for-all we quickly learned to organize it in a way that worked best for our team. Here is how our channels are organized:
General/Admin
- General — posts that you want the whole team to read that don’t apply to a specific project or topic
- Location stream — where you post when you are working from home, or on the road, or leaving early to go to the dentist. Having a separate channel for this has saved us tons of noise while being very useful.
Who should join: Everyone joins the General and Location streams.
Projects
We designated client projects with a #p in front of the Slack channel so it’s clear and easy to search for a subset of Slack channels that only relate to defined projects. While these are mostly client project channels, they can also include internal projects.
- #p-clientprojectname
- #p-newbuildingsignage
- #p-horizon
- …etc…
Who should join: Team members working in a specific project pod. This is generally by invitation only.
Practice development
We are a learning organization and a multidisciplinary firm; we regularly have conversations in Slack (as well as in person) about subjects that help us grow as individuals and as a team.
- #feminisms
- #anthropology
- #design-tech-culture
- #dftn (design for the network)
- #screencraft
- #code
- #graphic-design-lozenge
- #research
- #linguistics
- #marketing
- #mobile-code
- …..and more than we can list here
Who should join: Anyone who is interested in the topic. Some people come and go in these channels depending on what’s being discussed.
Fun
One thing that surprised us about using Slack was how much it helped us get to know each other as a company, and this was largely due to the channels we had that weren’t directly about work. We started off with one random channel called..Random…and that still exists today as a place to share funny stuff, have bizarre conversations, post gifs, etc…
Containing this to the Random channel helped us keep the noise out of other channels. We also have other “fun” channels relating to topics of interest:
- #random
- #running
- #nails
- #health-wellness
- #lunch
- #art
- #travel
- #tv
- ….and many more
Who should join: Anyone and everyone! We have men in our nails channel, and almost everyone in our lunch channel!
Private groups
We use private groups a fair bit at Normative. This is partly because of a limitation of Slack — there is no way to have a private conversation between 3 or more people other than starting a private group. Private groups are more temporary than our channels, and can be on subjects from an event we are organizing to a surprise birthday celebration
- #operationgreenbanana (someone’s birthday)
- #xxux (an event we were hosting)
Private Messages
Finally, one of the things that was interesting to us as we looked at stats of our Slack usage, was over half of our conversations in Slack are happening in private messages, not in public channels. We use PMs to help reduce the noise in public channels, when sometimes it’s not essential for the message to be openly viewed and archived.
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We still value face to face communications at Normative but Slack has become an essential tool for us, especially as the team grows and becomes more distributed.
Visit us at www.normative.com or on Twitter @normativedesign
