Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Slack is a tool, just like one of probably dozens you use in your day-to-day work. It doesn't set or enforce any guidelines for how it should be used. If left unchecked it has a tendency to amplify the worst parts of your company's culture. If you make an effort to moderate it, it can be a huge asset to productivity.
Speaking of the example in the article, there is absolutely no reason clients should have direct message channels with your company's employees and expect to get a response 24/7. This is true with email, Slack, SMS and every other form of communication.
The criticism I most often hear is "Slack expects me to be online all the time". No, YOUR COMPANY expects you to be online all the time. Slack can be closed with one click.
Uhh... except in Investment Banking. I suppose when your client is paying so much, they rightfully expect a 24/7 hotline.
Oh you want the 30min SLA? Add 2 zeroes
The company then institutes the right on-call practices, ensures support staff is trained, triage is correct, etc
But, yeah, a lot of places don't do that.
The problem isn't the tool, it's the mindset that often goes with it.
Sounds good in theory, rarely works well in practice.
The only times I've seen Slack work well is when everyone involved starts with similar expectations about how it should be used and what's appropriate. In my experience, this is easiest to achieve when Slack channels are closely aligned with teams who are working together.
The model tends to break down when Slack is used for communication that is better served by e-mail, calls, or meetings. An easy rule of thumb is that if it crosses department boundaries and/or is something that needs to be formally communicated to an entire team, it's better to direct it to e-mail or a scheduled call.
> Speaking of the example in the article, there is absolutely no reason clients should have direct message channels with your company's employees and expect to get a response 24/7.
Strongly agree, but it's not just clients. Sales people, for example, love to use Slack because it's a backdoor channel to circumvent management and go straight to the engineers.
And that's bad because?
Look, I feel ya, but it is important to stay professional even in the face of annoying coworkers.
I really like slack and use it constantly during work. If you need to go head down and focus on tasks needing concentration, put a notification on your slack profile saying you are busy. Make blocks on your calendar for sanity and concentration time and a slack status to match.
The same thing could be applied to email, I never answer my email later than work hours, sometimes the company itself is the issue, if they expect all hours communication I would look elsewhere, time and sanity are vital natural resources.
As a company we could and should do better at the support system, but that's just one aspect of the problem with company expectations.
In fact everyone now prefers this over the pre-Slack way where you had to randomly email or IM people one by one to try and get some help.
Interruption is a feature. If we let our platform teams get into the zone and code too much, they'd NIH our damn editors. It's important to have support burden as a brake on the development of custom crap, and a thumb on the scale in favor of deploying tools that a) developers might already know, b) the internet definitely knows, and c) are higher quality and more capable than even the brightest team with your budget could create.
We have support channels for our Redis and MySQL installations. It is crickets in there. But the people who write a custom NoSQL are rightfully getting slammed 24x7.
Tools placed in the hands of imperfect people will be used imperfectly, and in a way that amplifies the properties of the tool more than the priorities of the person.
I get that some environments might be fine without group chat, but for others it's indispensable.
But for the rest of my work there are questions but you can batch them if you think ahead, and write a good email. Or, just put the questions in the ticket and use the right collaboration tool.
I find that all chat-derived information needs to be rewritten (ideally) or being cut&paste into a document because chat is either ultimately ephemeral, or lives in an entirely different system from the rest.
Build a culture with bad tools and you get a messed up culture. Applies both to the structure of many companies and their communication tools.
Funnily enough the point about choosing Slack can actually be made for skilled professionals and their companies. They can choose where to work, curiously enough many actually up at precisely the firms their top schools are funneling them to.
Or, you do deep work, and lose on the decisions, chatter made in real time.
Slack turns the working environment to an equivalent of n open office where everyone chatters all of the time.
Good luck doing anything else.
People don't interrupt me on Slack, simply because Slack doesn't jump in front of my IDE. When I see a notification dot and have time, I'll look at it and reply
- email is good for mindful conversations. It is slow and doesn't need to interrupt. mailing lists feed into this.
- wikis are great for information that is designed. But it takes a lot of energy, and really requires dedicated maintenance. I've never worked anywhere where internal wikis were better than mediocre.
- bug systems have an off-label use - they are great for finding out about problems in company specific software/systems
- ticket systems are great for resolving small problems. But they seem to be closed systems that aren't searchable.
- slack. Now slack is good, not evil. I think where slack shines is up-to-the-minute communication where several people help work through a problem. but in moderation! Be polite, do not nag.
It is also exceptional at "trivial" knowledge that nonetheless holds back bright minds from progress - and is searchable.
What goes into slack is the less-formal-than-email stuff, the less-organized-than-wiki stuff, and less-critical-than-bug-report stuff.
>Speaking of the example in the article, there is absolutely no reason clients should have direct message channels with your company's employees and expect to get a response 24/7. This is true with email, Slack, SMS and every other form of communication.
the craziness is that without slack this client would have still done this. I've had clients with my personal cellphone # printed out and put in the server room 'for emergencies only' but I'd have managers call me in the middle of the night because their helpdesk hasnt responded to their problem yet.
I was effectively on-call 24/7 and couldnt go do anything.
In the real world, if we ever return to it, I like having physical team rooms, the sort of thing you have naturally when it's an early-stage startup in a single space. When everybody knows each other and is focused on the same goal, it's not hard to work out good communication and space-use norms. But scaling that up into large open-plan offices can quickly turn maddening. It's the tragedy of the audio commons, and anybody can walk up and tap you on the shoulder.
For me Slack is the same problem, but worse in that it removes some of they physical signals and feedback mechanisms that work in an open-plan office.
It probably helps we are over several timezones and each work irregular hours according to what's happening (kids pick up, teaching, sports..): we can't count on who is there at any time and consequently run the business asynchronously except for pre-planned meetings.
Open office doesn't mean that anyone can bother you at any time. It's important that companies set expectations about these things and enforce them to avoid that slippery slope.
Same goes for Slack. Once you expand beyond intra-team communication, it's important to set some expectations for what is and is not appropriate in Slack.
At the least happy point in my career, I had to be a member of over 100 Slack channels to get my job done and I received upwards of 100-200 @here and @channel notifications every day as people competed to stand above the noise. It was miserable. At the worst point, my time tracker was counting upwards of 4 hours per day spent in the Slack app.
Ironically, my efforts to push things to e-mails and scheduled calls was met with a lot of resistance from people who were afraid it would hamper flexibility and ruin asynchronous workflows. We also had absurd levels of office politics because people were treating each other as screen names instead of actual people working in other offices. I would take an open-office floorplan over that nonsense any day.
The goal is to allow all of our team members to control what their own day/communication rules are, and make those shoulder taps opt-in, not out.
For me the biggest annoying thing about Slack is the calling feature. I don't like unscheduled calls. It also often starts making a racket when I'm in the middle of another call with different software. I might write a browser plugin sometime to disable Slack calls.
For everything else though I usually just close Slack when I'm heads down working and open it during periodic breaks to check for anything important.
I can't recall where exactly but at one seminar I took, well before chat programs were ubiquitous, the presenter called out in-person interruptions. Just a co-worker dropping by randomly and starting a conversation. There are ways to deal with that, but those tricks don't work so well in a virtual world when you can have dozens of people simultaneously demanding your attention. (and TBH they stopped working very well with the move to open offices)
There are plenty of 'product X is bad' write-ups, but all of them try to blame something while the blame is for something intangible which is much harder to write a clever title for.
Same goes for the open office; that can work just fine if you make sure everyone shuts their mouth while working; having your 'own' office space with lots of distractions isn't any better than having a 'shared' space with the same distractions. The problem is the distraction, not the space. At best you would state that a certain type of space makes a certain type of distraction easier to occur. But that's a lot more words when you catch more eyeballs with 'office bad, isolation good'.
Before we complained about the office, home, or Slack, we complained about Email. And before that about the phone and the pager. This isn't new. What's new is the scale and the amount of people not taking steps to do what works for them.
From a workflow standpoint, this is optimal.
The catch is that many people view Slack as e-mail but with an expectation of instant response. The farther your Slack communications stray from engineers, the more likely you are to encounter this mindset.
Years ago I would have argued that Slack is merely a tool and these are personal problems, but after setting Slack up at a few workplaces I've realized that they structure the defaults and notification settings to encourage this "always connected, always on" mode by default.
So far no one is upset with me about it.
I don't get this, because email is instant response. It arrives more or less instantly. Almost all digital non-verbal communications can invite an instant response.
Why is Slack so different than email?
The excuses are the same... "Well, I didn't have Slack open..." "Well, I didn't have Outlook open..." Hell, you could go back in time and say, "Well, I didn't have ICQ open..."
I don't see any difference.
On Slack, like any other instant messaging (especially the ones where the fact that you've seen a message is communicated to the other side), you don't have this option. You can, of course, snooze messages, but I doubt many people even know about that option, and a high fraction of those who do know just find it, at that moment, easier to answer immediately then to think about "scheduling" that answer.
Combining this with other characteristics that make online chat more like in-person chat (from simple functions like the ease of sending messages by pressing Enter, to more advanced ones like seeing when the other side is typing), it shifts the behavior, and people feel compelled to respond instantly - both by the expectations set by others ("everyone responds instantly to Slack so I have to as well") but maybe even more importantly by subconscious "burden" of not responding to an "already opened message".
> Same goes for the open office; that can work just fine if you make sure everyone shuts their mouth while working
The analogy is not even close. You can mute slack, but you can't mute everyone in your office (without noise cancelling headphones being a permenant feature of your uniform).
I do a lot of work with people in China, and my main complain with WeChat as a "do everything" medium is that it is 100% set up to prioritize the sender. In practice, this means set up to prioritize the boss. It is an absolute disaster for those on the receiving end: it's nearly impossible to keep track of and effectively act on incoming information. You must respond RIGHT NOW or that information is essentially lost.
In the end, I believe a messaging channel that requires more upfront work on the part of the sender ends up providing knock-on positive effects for everyone involved. But due to the generally ego-first thought process of all human beings – and the absolutely ego-first though process of most bosses – the channel that affords the least friction in sending appeals the most.
Everyone likes to think of themselves as being on the originating end of the firehose.
On one hand, maybe I'm an asshole because I don't care to have three separate conversations about my weekend.
But there's something about Internet Messaging which makes it highly inefficient and basic small talk that should last 30 seconds in the office, last 30 minutes.
I tend to use phrases like "ttyl" or "cya" to try to escape the conversation. But it doesn't always work. So I end up just not responding after awhile. Either way I look like an asshole.
Slack or not, online communication lacks etiquette.
I've worked for the past 8 years on remote teams, and from my experience, having a shared mind is very important to a highly productive team.
My suggestion to you would be to communicate with your coworkers that you've already talked about your weekend with so-and-so, building resentment with your coworkers is never good. Maybe even create a channel specifically to talk about your weekends! Who knows, you may like it. :)
I don't have 8 years experience working from home, so it's possible this is something I can improve. I like the idea of having an open-channel for weekend discussion.
Its probably you not them. If you dont like people message you about non work topics, just ignore their message or directly tell them that you are busy. They will get the message and stop being friendly with you.
Instead, we carry on live, highly-interactive communications. Everyone pretty much understands if you are busy, however, and don't respond immediately.
Work without Slack would be awful.
I actually found it to be a very nice way to keep casual communications open to a remote workforce, while also allowing for actual work communications and collaboration.
Now that I'm in another position at a company that is remote due to COVID, I find not having a well-managed Slack workspace a minus and I do feel less connected to the team.
It doesn't replace email, it replaced those other communication apps.
I am aware that Slack has a crusade against email but the article or that business example didn't ask why not both? There's a need for real-time communication and there's a need for email too.
My work email is almost all automated emails, communications with people external to the company, and a small percent of internal communications. Nearly everything else is done over Slack.
So in my experience, it certainly is replacing email. Now, I'm not sure that it should. But it is.
I wonder how many more productivity and sanity points society would have gained in the past few years if Slack had built in an @@ or @! symbol for a "SuperPing" that's differentiated from a normal ping (five knocks after the brush, perhaps?). Or even provide a structured way to set a priority on a mention, letting you reference that someone was involved in a thing you're writing about or that they should see it as an FYI, but make it clear that they don't need to worry about it immediately. You can make the UI have sane defaults so it's not overwhelming, then you either let culture sort itself out if people are misusing the system, or otherwise ensure there are speed-bumps to misuse.
It's ironic that even YouTube streamers benefit from being able to triage Superchats, with color coding based on the monetary value the sender ascribes to getting the streamer's immediate attention. Why is donation-based entertainment more sane than the business environment?
At the end of the day, humans don't work well when they're "always on." There's a balance between UI simplicity and the fundamental UX principal that not everything can be important. I do wonder if there's research on how many classes of things people can handle on a screen - rather than a binary classification between mentions and non-mentions, is there anything preventing us from handling a third priority level?
a) posts and comments logically group discussion better than multiple interleaved discussions in a channel
b) the newsfeed does a decent job of surfacing interesting content (posts from groups/people you interact most with)
c) notifications in one place (with per-group options like “notify for every post” or “only when tagged” or whatever) beats clicking through each channel to scan everything that happened since you last looked. It puts the power to choose what to consume back in the hands of the recipient.
Sure, it’s not a real-time discussion platform but, IMO, most things at work don’t need this anyway. For the times this is useful (incident response, etc) small messenger groups work well.
YMMV, opinions mine, contents may settle in transit, etc
This marks the author out as a fantasist. Once a company gets above a couple of hundred employees, the majority of the new employees simply are not the sort of people who do "long, undistracted stretches of work". You can't carry on for ever hiring people who both have that sort of mentality and intellectual fortitude, and also want their job to completely dominate their day rather than just 9-5.
corporate communication changed medium but remained the same.
paper/reports/memos > email clients > rich email clients > webmail+blackberry > webmail+email apps > slack (desktop email app)
it is just the first, crappy, desktop email app client. The incumbents will eat them soon, just like microsoft and oracle ate all other email clients in the 90s. I mean, slack is already in someone’s plate.
Now, if someone sends me an email, it might get buried between other stuff
The whole upside of slack for me is that it makes it easier for me not to miss the things I absolutely need to see. I get a deluge of automated or templated emails every day. How am I ever supposed to reliably sift through the noise?
> hi edmundsauto
(silence until you reply)
I just retired recently and can say truthfully that simply not having to deal with Slack has improved my sense of wellbeing immensely.
Author Calvin Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He seems to have a nice side gig as a tech pundit:
They laugh at me, but I think its a viable use case
I use Slack daily and I've never brought it home with me.
No I’m not. The workplace might be completely in the blue about this, but if a workplace uses a tool that offers convince in installing this tool to your personal devises (or off hour workstation usage):
a) Make it absolutely clear that this is not expected
b) Provide instructions for workers on how turn the tool off during non-work hours
c) Reprimand users that bother workers with this tool during non-work hours
Anything short of that is complacency in labor abuse.
The problem slack (and tools like it) offers is that there will be a point where installing and enabling it on personal devises or out side of work hours will be convenient, be it off site on a convention or when finishing up a tight deadline. After that time workers will probably not remove it from the devise (the power of defaults), and that opens up avenues for complacency in abuse. At no point does the workplace need to make a conscious choice of malice, however harm will happen if the tool is used without disclaimers.
This depends on the situation. A workplace that enforce after hours always-on presence? Absolutely despicable. Should even be illegal, in my opinion.
An employee who decides on their own to install Slack on their personal device and then decide on their own to open it outside work hours? That's on them.
The same pressure to check Slack on your personal phone on your off-time would be applied to work email, sms, or whatever it's used instead of slack
Even for workers that don’t engage in social activities over slack normally might install it to their personal devices during a conference because that is where their colleagues are conversing, and then simply forget to uninstall it after the conference is done.
A workplace has to be aware that this is how normal people use this tool, and needs to make sure that no one misuses this access to workers during off hours.
As others have said, Slack often amplifies toxic workplace culture, just like any effective tool tends to be a "force multiplier" in the hands of its users.
In other words: The name tells you what it's for.