Pet Loyalty Slack & Communications Guide
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Slack is the killer app for remote work when done well, and a net-negative on team productivity when done poorly. Slack should empower you, not bog you down. Team members should not be beholden to slack the way 00’s employees were chained to their email. However, it should be a source of spontaneous brainstorming, idea sharing, and building of collective knowledge. Here’s how I do that.
People (Users)
Teams and User Groups
Make sure to keep user groups updated so that a message to “@sales-team” pings all relevant parties. This makes it easier to keep messages public while allowing people to keep notifications to a minimum without missing conversations or questions that involve them. Updated teams also adds value to status updates, as it lets you see at-a-glance who on a team is available.
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Pro tip: Tag user groups instead of @here or @channel tags to avoid accidentally sending too many notifications. |
@Tagging
One key item to preserve public info sharing and grow institutional knowledge is to contain directed, non-private questions to
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Once a channel or team gets big enough, it’s great to have thread discipline, meaning, formatting channel posts as announcements with discussions to follow underneath. In many cases, I recommend making a channel for leadership announcements where only admins can post to the channel and follow up conversations must be threaded.
Content Channels
Note: It is not advisable to have channels dedicated to types of posts. If I’m a marketer, I want to report to #marketing or #revenue to see marketing-related messages, not have to check a separate channel for “marketing meeting attendance.” If you cannot make the marketing meeting, the relevant parties are all already checking #marketing, so there’s no need to spread information thin across more channels here.
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Until these systems are cemented, I always prefer redundancyredundancy is a good idea.
Have a question around a Trello task? Tag the concerned party in a Trello comment and also share the card with them in a Slack direct message.
Going to miss a meeting? Mark yourself as unavailable and also add a note to send to all recipients via email (even better to message them in Slack, too).
Taking a day off? Leave a comment in the #out-of-office channel and also mark it on your calendar.
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