21 November 2024

Effective Slack Communication

A four step strategy to protect time for deeply focused work, provide timely resolution to questions and issues, and foster a more open and collaborative culture of communication.

Introduction

Slack is a widely used communications platform for organizations. It's most basic and universally used features include:

Channels: what an idea!

Being able to directly chat with any member or any ad-hoc group in an organization goes a long way toward fostering free flowing communication. As an organization grows the network of potential direct-message connections also grows--exponentially! Effective employment of 'channels' quickly becomes paramount to maintaining organizational clarity and a coherent communication history.

Channels allow anyone interested in a specific topic to observe or even join in the conversation. Most channels tend to be long-lived, but some are created and archived in a relatively short period of time. As the organization evolves, channels tend to proliferate. Some channels end up becoming effectively abandoned as conversation dies down and people move on. The end result, without any effort at curation: a morass of sundry 'ghost' channels.

The plight of the established member

Consider the eventual plight of a long-time member of an organization that uses Slack. After a few years such a user will have been invited to literally dozens of channels across the organization. They will have joined channels just for their team's use, channels for their larger department, channels for cross-team collaboration and announcements, HR/company channels, operations channels full of automated messages from various production systems, and unofficial channels galore.

Each channel, like a greedy cell-phone app (you know, the kind that sends you all those annoying notifications?), asserts its content as THE PRIORITY via seemingly innocuous popups and whimsical sound effects. Every few weeks a new channel is born and, like a brand new (digital) pet needing attention, the new channel contributes its notifications to the overall burden. Becoming increasingly busy with all the 'noise' means becoming increasingly unproductive.

A daunting reality for new members

Now consider the daunting reality of the newly added member. As they enter the new Slack workspace they browse the offering of public channels and peruse the threads contained therein to get a feel for what each channel is all about. They consider which ones they should belong to. They begin making guesses as to where to post certain questions and requests, but then comes an inevitable hesitancy to join in the chaos, especially if they observe that questions asked in the 'wrong' channel get the cold shoulder, or worse, are called out in broad daylight by higher-ups ("this isn't the right channel for that"). At that point it won't matter how many focus groups are created to deal with the ever-spreading disease:

😱 'Lack of Communication' 😱

(It's ironic, isn't it? We have more ways to communicate, and over longer distances, than ever before. But for some reason we just can't get on the same page with that other team or department, but I digress somewhat...)

Over some time, the new organization member learns who their 'helpers' are, and they get their stuff done by sending the right DM (direct message) to the right person whenever needed. At this point there's no sense incurring any risk of public censure by posting in a channel and so, the majority of meaningful collaboration is doomed to happen in private conversations rather than in public channels where such communications might be more effective and benefit everyone else who shares similar challenges and questions.

Now what?

In any organization there will be seemingly conflicting concerns between teams and departments. Engineers, for example, need big chunks of uninterrupted time in which to focus on hard problems. Tech support reps and sales people often need answers from engineers, and they need those answers quickly (because they are on the phone with potential and current customers)! To top it off, managers and stakeholders would like to be able to keep their finger on the pulse of the many collaborative efforts going on across the organization.

Without further ado, I propose a four step strategy to protect time for deeply focused work, provide timely resolution of questions and issues, and foster a more open and collaborative culture of communication, which should make everyone happier and more effective. Here are the four steps toward achieving that reality:

  1. Leadership establishes a structure of long-lived, 'monitored' channels.
  2. Members join as many monitored channels as needed and mute as many channels as possible.
  3. Members and teams become strategic in responding to posts on their 'monitored' channels.
  4. Everyone embraces a "no wrong doors" policy by implementing 'warm handoffs'.

Let's go over each of the above points in more detail.

1. Monitored Channels

A member of an organization should be able to approach any team or department within that organization with any communication and expect a positive, safe, and timely interaction with that team or department. To that end, organization leadership establishes a structure of long-lived, 'monitored' channels as follows:

  1. The organization will define a public monitored channel for the entire organization, perhaps something as simple as #company.
  2. Every department and every team will define a public monitored channel whose name is prefixed according to agreed-upon conventions, perhaps something like #team-... and #dept-.... This prefixing strategy allows anyone to search for a team's monitored channel by typing the prefix in Slack to see all matching channels.
  3. As teams and departments are added or restructured, outdated channels can be renamed or archived, and new channels created as needed. The listing of monitored channels should accurately reflect the actual org chart.
  4. Any organization member may join and post a message in the monitored channel of any team or department with any question, request, or announcement at any time and for any reason, with reasonable assurance that their request will be attended to in a timely fashion (during business hours), and without fear of censure or ridicule for posting in a 'wrong' place.

Recommendation #1: Each team and department might also define a corresponding private channel that only includes their own members.

Recommendation #2: In establishing these 'monitored' channels, teams can and should define any other public or private channels necessary for collaboration on their projects and initiatives.

Monitored Department Channels

For the sake of illustration, here's how an organization might define their monitored department channels. I've listed them here in alphabetical order. Please don't get hung up on the particular names or divisions I've chosen here.

Monitored Team Channels

Likewise, here's a possible list of team channels (again, don't get hung up on this if it doesn't match your organization, this is just for illustration purposes):

Recommendation #3: Use the Slack sidebar to group all the department channels and all the team channels. This will allow for easily collapsing each group so it doesn't take up too much screen real-estate.

Recommendation #4: Use the Slack sidebar to group all members of your team, as well as stakeholders you regularly work with.

2. Join (and mute!) all the channels

In order to observe or post on a channel, a member must join or be invited to the channel. So, everyone should probably join a bunch of the above channels so they can post wherever needed as issues arise. If you know what team to approach, great! Simply post your question in that team’s monitored channel. If you're pretty sure it's an engineering issue but don't know which team in the engineering department to approach, post in the #dept-engineering. If you really just don't know where to go, post in #company.

But if we join all those channels won't we be bombarded with notifications of all the questions, issues, requests, and announcements from those channels?

Yes, if we leave notifications on (which is the default setting). But we're not going to do that. We're going to right-click and mute them all!

But how will anyone get answers to their questions if everyone else has muted all the channels?

3. Strategic Monitoring and Triage

Here's one possible strategy:

Each team will establish a regular rotation, assigning at least one member of their team to be a 'monitor' for a predetermined period of time. While serving as a 'monitor' they will un-mute their team's monitoring channel and their department's monitoring channel. Each department will assign one of their monitors to serve as a representative from their department and will un-mute and monitor the company-wide channel.

It will be each monitor's duty to observe messages posted in their un-muted channels and to respond as helpfully as possible. At any point they can pull in members of their team for extra assistance, or people from other teams to help resolve the issues brought to their channel. Those serving as monitors sacrifice some potential for deeply focused work in order to preserve that possibility for the rest of their teams. An unforeseen benefit to this approach is that those serving as monitors get regular exposure to the issues facing other teams and they encounter opportunities to learn about aspects of their team's responsibility and domain that they normally don't work with.

Those serving as monitors will need to trade time with others on their teams to deal with PTO requests that come up.

How teams and departments decide to monitor their channel is up to each team and department, but the idea is that we have a few people staffing the monitored channels at all times so everybody else can mostly focus on getting their stuff done.

Recommendation #5: Don't just mute the monitoring channels. Consider muting all the #unofficial-... channels and anything else that isn't mission-critical. Make a checklist to catch up on those channels at regular intervals. You don't need instant notification every time someone posts a video to #unofficial-cat-lovers. Be intentional about how you use Slack.

4. Warm Handoffs

But what about when someone posts in the wrong channel? You know it's going to happen...

Well, of course it's going to happen! I submit that it is counterproductive to see this as a problem. This whole system is designed to absorb the unavoidable imprecision of busy human beings just trying to get stuff done. The final missing piece is described by yet another 'mike' and it's called 'Warm Handoffs'. I'll quote the basic principles, with some emphasis added:

  • If someone asks a question in the wrong channel, and you know the right channel, link their question in the right channel, tagging them, and explain why you’re making the handoff, along with any additional context you have.
  • If someone asks a question in the wrong channel, and you’re not sure where it should go, link their question in a shared channel asking who can help, along with any additional context you have.

Can you see how this principle is like the cherry on top of this whole banana split of a proposal? Here are a few examples of how this might play out:

The monitor for #team-frontend sees a message posted by someone from sales and knows it should be owned by someone in #team-operations, so they start their own post in #team-operations, linking the old post, tagging the OP, and then they add what they know that might help.

Or maybe the monitor for #team-frontend doesn't know exactly which team to approach, but they know it's an engineering issue, so they handoff (as above) to #dept-engineering, a monitored channel with a wider scope, or maybe the question is ambiguous enough that the handoff might happen on the #company channel.

This same idea is nicely expressed as 'no wrong doors', AN EXCELLENT ARTICLE--go read it right now and come back! Ok, I figured you probably wouldn't, so here's a summary of the main point:

Aim to provide help to individuals even if they show up to the wrong place to request it. Members of teams and departments are far better equipped to navigate their own department than an outside individual who knows nothing about that department's internal function.

Conclusion

I've presented a four-pronged approach to protect time for deeply focused work, provide timely resolution to questions and issues, and foster a more open and collaborative culture of communication. All we have to do is:

  1. setup 'monitoring' channels that mirror our organizational structure,
  2. get people into the channels (and mute them!),
  3. strategically monitor said channels, allowing most everyone to focus on their work most of the time, and
  4. embrace a "no wrong doors" policy by implementing 'warm handoffs'.

What do you think? Can we do it?