Pet Loyalty Slack & Communications Guide
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Knowing where, how, and when to communicate ensures that high-priority communications are heard while lighthearted chit chat and ideation also have a place.
Urgent/Important | Not Urgent | |
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Synchronous | Phone call or Slack Huddle to relevant parties. | Add to existing recurring meeting agenda or, if there is none, schedule a meeting with an agenda. |
Asynchronous | Tag relevant parties in a public slack channel, call or huddle if no reply | Tag relevant parties in a public slack channel |
Private | Phone call or direct message | Phone call or direct message |
Urgency
Is the problem actively causing a service outage or costing the company resources? If so, it’s urgent. Feel free to get the attention of relevant parties with a phone call, huddle, or direct message via any mobile platform.
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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, direct non-private questions to an individual as a tagged public message. This exposes all members of the topic channel to the knowledge that might be shared, and it answers the question for anyone else who might not have felt comfortable asking. It also makes the text searchable in the future.
Profiles
As a global company, our profiles are a quick primer to help newcomers and colleagues understand our current position.
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Slack <> Google Calendar Integration for Status
Full explanation of integrating Google Calendar and syncing status is here:
https://slack.com/help/articles/206329808-Google-Calendar-for-Slack#add-the-google-calendar-app
Channels
Channels are about placing conversation in public spaces so that collaboration can be more spontaneous, ideas can flow & excitement can generate, and institutional knowledge is gained.
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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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Channels serve a handful purposes:
general purpose, all-team by topic (#random, #general, #positivity)
team-specific by general function (#sales, #engineering, etc)
Cross-team by campaign (#adp-integration)
Bot reports (#crm-salesforce, #rollbar xyz, #new-lead-notifications)
Business-unit specific (#sbi-v2, #sbi-v3)
Formatting
Use an underscore “_” to denote hierarchy, and use a hyphen “-” to replace a space.
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Notes: I want to label campaign- and problem-specific channels so that they don’t roll into the fold. What are the types of channels I’m seeing arise? I also want to roll automated notifications into similar channels.
By customer (#cust-)
By feature or tool (powerBI, ezVet, ) (#…<tool>)
By vendor or bot integration (rollbar, aws, etc.) (#…bot)
By campaign (#camp-
How do we use naming to help group these? CS_Title, ENG_Title, etc…
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Meeting Notes / Agendas - Highly recommended to have an agenda for every meeting. Rob does this by keeping a template agenda as a text replace in keyboard settings so it works on all devices. Attaching notes from Google Docs is also nice.
Marketing, Sales, & Customer Success: Weekly meetings with no agenda are optional, provided attendees mark their attendance as “Declined” when no agenda is present.
Agendas are to be added to meetings 24 hours prior to the meeting’s start.
In modern remote organizations, email is advised best for automated incoming messages from service providers and vendors & external communications.
Why?
Slack has edits, reactions, threads, opt-out for groups, readability, reminders, and more.
Slack isolates client communications from a catastrophic “reply-all” that contains sensitive internal discussion, pricing detail, or private comments. I’ve personally seen private client communications several times due to lack of reply-all discipline!
Slack has Huddles that allow people to quickly solve issues if both are clearly available for synchronous communication.
Most “From” emails from teammates are calendar invite updates, file shares, and other automated messages that desensitize readers from reacting appropriately to an authentic or important message from a teammate.
Got an email you want to share? Check out this Gmail > Slack integration that shares email with relevant parties and isolates internal discussion to Slack.
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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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Balancing push-pull with redundancy: ensure it’s done in a way that is equally “push” and “pull.” For instance, a question that’s asked in Slack, Email, and SMS is more likely to be annoying. But asking a question in a Trello task (pull, lives in a low-traffic environment) and Slack DM (push, forces it to a person’s queue) is a nice balance.
Notes and Best Practices
Readability
Sample post style:
😃 Use Emoji and Bold to create subject line
Then lead with the ask in a separate line and/or with italics.
Consider the difficulty of reading a huge block of text without first knowing why you’re being told to read it. Is it a product question? An engineering question? Is someone asking you to take over a client or just to provide some commentary? If you read an entire paragraph without context, then the ask is buried in the middle or at the end, then the person has to re-read your entire paragraph to understand it. Also, consider that your colleagues, like you, are working on several different initiatives throughout the day. If you @tag them and pull them into your world, make it easier for them to switch from their world to yours by making it clear why they were invited. Note that this huge block of text is intentional to compare the difference between simple and direct statements versus large blocks. Also note that there’s tons of room for details once the reader understands the context and can dive in, but leading with all of the detail without first setting the tone is more likely to make the reader’s eyes glaze over before they’ve fully gotten to a level of understanding with you.
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Note that the above is just an example and doesn’t need followed. The main takeaway here is to identify specifically what your ask is of a teammate before introducing them to a long text block full of details and context. Thanks!