Slack etiquette, best practices, and tips.
This is a company resource, so feel free to submit your PRs to add and edit it.
Everybody at kohactive is a member of three vital channels.
The first is #general which is where everyday conversations happen. This channel can be used to say "good morning", "good night", chat about the weather or query the team.
The #announcements channel is a place to make company-wide announcements like you're sick and won't be in, you're running late, or working from home. You should never respond to a message in this channel. If you must respond, use a threaded message.
The #praise channel is a special place where praise from Small Improvements comes in. While not much conversation happens here, it's always great to see the team sharing praise for one another.
There are various channels available for specific interests or topics. For example, we can share our creative inspiration and discuss design with the #design channel. The development team is typically sharing links and solving problems in #dev. If you're into #music, #health or #podcasts there is a channel for those as well. For help with internal operations, check our the #hr or #401k channels.
Searching an already busy Slack team is vital to getting information out of it as an employee. The easiest way to start with search is by using the keyboard shortcut command-f (ctrl-f on win/linux) to search just the currently viewed channel. Results can be filtered by messages or files, and you can even filter down to a specific file type, like images.
There are many additional search modifiers, but people tend to use things like has:star, has:(reaction emoji name), and time-based modifiers. As part of new hire training, it’s fun to give an exercise where people are asked to search for a message, fact, or file that was posted well before they arrived. For example, how the company got its name (if the answer is deep in your Slack archives, like ours is).
This is a good rule wherever you are. It's easy to infer tone in Slack, but if a person says something that sounds off, give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they meant well.
If there is someone who isn't behaving well or makes you uncomfortable, be honest with them if you can. If you are uncomfortable doing that or feel the person isn't being receptive, DM an admin and let them know.
There are many people in your team and you may not know them all. Be respectful to those of all genders, sexes, races, sexual orientations, religions... You get the picture.
Be mindful in what you post: what may seem innocuous to you could be offensive to someone else. If you ever have a question about whether you should post something, don't do it!
Slack is designed to add transparency to our company, so it's best to default to communication in public channels whenever possible. Posting messages in public channels means anyone in the company can see what various teams are working on, see how much progress people are making on projects, and search the archive for context they need.
It’s tempting to make sure no one misses your very important message, but it’s courteous to refrain from notifying large groups of people if it’s not truly necessary. Using @everyone notifies every user on Slack, which may include clients and contractors. I recommend never using it. Similarly, @channel notifies everybody in the current channel, regardless of whether they are online or not. Only use @channel for important announcements. To communicate with all online users of a channel, use @here to bing those online and available. Also, consider using groups like @developers or @designers. We could make more if they will help.
While Slack is a great tool for real-time communications, we are not obliged to always be available. If it's not urgent, don't distract somebody with a message like "Yo!", "Ping!", "Hey!" and wait for their response. Instead, try treating Slack like an email and send a thorough message about what you want to discuss and patiently wait for their response.
Slack has a great tool called Do Not Disturb (DND) that allows you to turn off notifications for a given period. You can setup default hours in which you are typically not available, e.g. from 5pm - 8am CST or go into DND mode for a few hours while you get some work done. It's highly recommended that you use this tool as part of your workflow. When a colleague is in DND be mindful and let them get back to you as soon as they are available. As a rule of thumb, if you need to send a message outside of the recipient’s normal working hours, there is no expectation of an immediate reply. Generally, this is a good rule to keep, given the recipient of any message might be otherwise occupied — in a meeting, heads down on project work, or eating lunch.
There’s a saying at Slack that “all channels tend towards #random.” We use the term “raccoon” (and an associated custom emoji) to denote when a discussion should take place in another channel. In a busy general channel where someone is asking lots of very specific questions, it’s not uncommon to see a message saying someone should “raccoon their questions to DM” or a specific team instead. It’s not used to shame anyone, but instead to help teach everyone where a better place for the discussion might be.
Slack is about communication, so use public channels whenever possible. This is good for transparency, but also keeps the community vibrant and alive. You also have an opportunity to help someone else who might find your conversation helpful or encouraging.
If you need to have a private conversation between yourself and a few other people, start a private channel. Slack lets you set up group DMs but its not possible to invite more people to those, so the history will be forever locked away. Private channels let you control access to the conversation, but lets you share it with others at a later time.
Slack allows you to star a channel, DM, or group as well individual messages. Star the people and channels that are important to you or that you frequently communicate in. If you see an important message in Slack then star it for later.
Getting familiar with reminders is another great way to get your work done.
Say you have a presentation due tomorrow, type /remind me at 9am to share my finished presentation with the team and slackbot will acknowledge, then later send you a direct message exactly when you asked. You can also set a reminder on any message. If someone on your team says “remember to fill out your training survey before the end of day” click the message actions button, mouseover Remind me about this and select a time like in 3 hours to get a notification linking to the message.
The /remind function is one of our built-in slash commands, and you might want to poke around your team by just typing a forward slash into the message box to see all the autocomplete suggestions and what each slash command does.
A great way of keeping an important message available for a channel is using the Pinning feature. Simply click the ellipsis "..." on a message and select Pin to #channel-name. You can pin as many messages as you'd like to keep the entire channel up to date. For example, if you have a document that you're working on you can pin the link to make it easily available to the whole team. If you're done with the document, you can unpin it.
Sometimes there are multiple conversations happening in a single channel or sometimes there is a question that was asked but not answered immediately. Rather than message directly into the channel, you can click into any message and add a threaded response. This will create a new threaded conversation that is available from the channel but not polluting the ongoing conversation.
Reactions are a great way to respond without posting a new message in Slack. For example, if somebody say's happy birthday! to somebody, you can add an emoji reaction like a cake balloon or party larry.
