Stop talking, start Slacking

Let’s start with a fun fact: at Stuart, we use Slack as our main internal communication tool. Each year, we have a ranking of the people using Slack the most, and each year… I have been the number one. That’s a 2.0 chatty Shaheen.

Before Slack, I have used Yammer when I was doing an internship at Capgemini, and Skype when I was working at Rocket Internet PT. But since Stuart, it has been 100% Slack and I have also been using it for various other projets, so I have now about 4 different Slack logins.

A month ago, we had a “Lunch and Learn” event at Stuart Delivery where someone from Monzo came to present us the best practices of Slack, as he set up the rules for his team. He stated the scope of his project from the beginning: it was not about getting to know and implement a communication tool, it was about overall define the rules of communication at Monzo. And this is not a small topic. As companies and startups in particular are growing so fast, the risk is that there are more and more closed discussions between a few people and no transparency across the team, or on the contrary too much noise and too many messages disturbing the productivity of the team.

So it is very important to tackle the internal communication processes and rules early on to have a good basis to scale your team and business. Ideally, you want everyone to know when he should email vs. put on Slack or call to avoid:
- people using emails too often for urgent topics, while they might not be seen fast enough by the key stakeholders and thus their answer might come too late
- on the contrary, people using Slack for everything and creating too many noise / interruption for their coworkers, who will gradually pay less attention to their Slack messages — which might in turn be detrimental if they’re about an important new and / or urgent topic
- and what about these people who walk at your desk every time for any topic, where a simple Slack message answered in the 10 minutes would do the trick?

Therefore, to optimise everyone’s productivity and make sure each topic is handled with the urgency (or non-urgency) it deserves, it is crucial to define some clear rules from the beginning and make sure they’re properly communicated and implemented across your team.

Back to Slack — let’s start with the structure.

When I arrived at SoMuchMore (Rocket Internet), one of the first thing I did was to organise the tools used by the team, notably the Google Drive that was extensively used, as following:
- define the structure ie. which folders, sub-folders, which naming codes, etc
- define clear ownership per folder to make sure they stay tidy and not everyone starts adding folders / documents

A similar approach can be applied to Slack in order to have a clean and scalable set up:
- one or two admin in charge of giving access to Slack
- define the first and fundamental channels of your Slack: general, london-office, paris-office, operations, sales, intelligence, etc
- make sure people feel free to create new channels if they want but keep an eye on this
- a bot tells you when you’re in channels you are not using anymore and suggests you to get out of them.

The basic features are obviously to enable 1:1 communications with your colleagues as well as the creation of Slack “channels” which are groups of a couple of people. For instance we have a Slack channel for the Stuart London office, Commercial team or Operations team.

Within your messages, you can of course tag people when you need them to pay special attention, which will send them a notification (if they don’t turn them off!). You can also create threads which is the same idea as an email thread, ie you gather all the messages about one topic at the same place instead of having a long vertical discussion mixing up all topics.

Beyond these features, you can also integrate Slack with various tools very easily so it becomes a monitoring tool flagging some situations. For instance, at Stuart, we have integrated Slack with our backend so we can get notified of orders created or failed orders, which enables our Support team to take action.
There are tons of other features available on Slack such as:
- seeing all the messages where you’ve been tagged if you click on the “@“ at the top right corner of your screen
- star messages and then find them when clicking on the star emoji at the top right corner of your screen
- set up reminder by using the function “/remind (slack channel or person)(message)(day)

And lots lots more! Make sure to reach out to your Slack Account Manager who will provide you with the best tips and tricks related to your organisation to leverage Slack as much as possible.

Do you have any other Slack best practice? Don’t hesitate to share by adding a comment on this article — together we’re stronger ;)

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