Collaborate with kindness: Etiquette tips in Slack

"Scared of public channels" often means "doesn't have the psychological safety to say something out loud that might end up being perceived negatively or as though they don't know what they're doing."

Sending a message in a public channel is psychologically akin to walking into a room full of people and just loudly proclaiming/demanding help. I don't think people are simply 'scared' to do it -- they just (rightly) intuit that it's somewhat strange and counterintuitive that it would be the preferred method over talking to an individual and building a rapport / friendship.

I was dreaming of a world where slack doesn’t exist and we use only mailing lists ;0

If they only say "Hey" with no follow-up, I'll just assume it was nothing and they got distracted. In smaller environments it could work to link them to e.g. https://nohello.net/en/ and / or educate them though.

But turning off notifications works; it keeps your focus, and making them wait for a reply trains and reminds them that it's asynchronous communication. A lot of people have grown accustomed to fast replies though.

Another non-confrontational way of dealing with this issue is to engage the first time they do it, and when the conversation is about to end, tell them "hey by the way, in the future I'd appreciate it if instead of saying "hey" and waiting for me to reply, you'd just write me the question in one go, as that would be less distraction for me. Thank you, hope you understand" or something similar.

This way there won't be any misunderstandings about why some people seem more responsive than others, because now that person knows how to communicate with you.

The only way "Hey" is acceptable is if there's an immediate followup with whatever it is the person is asking for.

I'd love if chat apps had the option to notify you only once per contact in the span of a a minute. Bonus point for delaying the notification by 10s after the last message, in case another one is following.

A colleague just sent me a single question in 11 messages (and yes the first one was "hello"). People use the enter key as punctuation, which shouldn't be a problem and is fixable by software. But as of now it spams notifications.

Your suggestion is a really good one. We have channels with several hundred people in it, and there threads are a must. In the smaller team channels I often reply out-of-thread, since it doesn't matter.

Slack's threads design feels like they don't want you to use them. They take a small fraction of the screen, they're awkward to find, and they're awkward to keep open. Zulip has gotten the entire chat thing entirely right, yet Slack continues to treat the most important unit of conversation (the thread) as a fourth-class citizen.

I went from a company of 900 people to a company of 80 and wow what a difference. There was so much noise in the larger company that I'd spend probably 2 hours a day reading slacks (and they rarely threaded messages even). Fast forward to here and it's like a breath of fresh air. They're very conscious about threading and while I now have time to read every thread I can tell at a glance if I should. Doesn't really help your problem except to say that assiduous threading does seem to make it easier at a certain scale to know which messages to ignore.

That's not the gotcha you think it is; it's not just "hey", it's an actionable question.

Ah, you must have stumbled upon https://nohello.net/ too. I think what they mean is "don't just say hey and leave a person hanging", i.e. if you have a long message to write just put it all together instead of potentially attracting somebody's attention to make them wait while <user is writing something..>.

I have a coworker that does it constantly and it bugs me to no end. I have to respond, they then ask what they were going to ask seconds or minutes later. Effectively breaking my concentration twice and making things take longer than they should.

I can tell you why it bothers me personally. As soon as I see "Hey" my attention has been captured by the sender. I now have to sit there and wait for them to type out everything else. Or they sit there and wait for me to respond before they send any follow up. After waiting awhile maybe I learn that what they are sending is not time urgent, but too late my attention has already been completely removed from what I was working on.

The root of the problem is some people see Slack as more synchronous than others. I personally see Slack as more async (more synchronous than an email, but less than a phone call). I screen messages as they come in and respond in a way that makes sense to me. Likewise if I send somebody a message I don't expect an immediate response. Somebody simply sending "Hey" forces the conversation to be synchronous.

People have to prioritize their time. If they get messages from someone, they have to weigh responding to it against all of the other things they may be doing with their time (other messages, that ticket you’re working on, etc etc.)

By just saying “Hey”, you’re leaving a message of unknown priority. You’re giving the other party zero information as to what you might want. If you say that to me, you’re saying “I need your attention, but I’m not going to tell you what for.” If I respond, are you going to ask me a brief question? Are you going to drag me into a meeting that may take tons of my time? Who knows?

Also, I may not get your “hey” until an hour later. Now what happens? I reply “hi”. Then I have to sit and wait around for you to get my response, so that you can reply with what you were going to ask me. But what if you’re away? Now we’re playing message tag. Contrast that with what would have happened if you would have just put your question in the original message: Now, I can read your question, do my best to find an answer, and give you a reply, and I can do so at my leisure. When I respond and you’re not available, the answer is waiting for you when you get back.

I make it a personal policy to just not respond when somebody just says “hey”. If it’s important, you’ll follow up. I once had a status meeting where someone said “I’m blocked on X because I reached out to ninkendo for support, and he didn’t respond”, to which my response was “You didn’t reach out to me for support at all, you just said ‘hi’. How was I supposed to know you had something important to ask? For all I know you just wanted to ask about my weekend…”

You can say hello/good morning/etc. at the beginning of your message. What's annoying is when you send a greeting as a separate message. The greeting itself is not annoying, and, I agree, is polite. But distracting someone with a zero-information message and then making them wait for what you actually want to say is decidedly impolite.

I think it depends on the moment it happens. When I managed a larger team I could get a bit of communication overload. I'm trying to juggle ten requests at the same time, prioritizing who/what needs answering/updating and generally making sure I am unblocking anyone/everyone.

So when I see "Hey" I rarely see it as polite. What I'm thinking is "What do you want!? Spit it out!". IMO, politeness would be something like "Hey, I have a question about X, is now a good time". That at least I can prioritize. All I want is a tiny bit of context to the "Hey".

It likely depends on the broad culture behind it. If someone sends a "Hey" and then is a fast enough typer and immediately can get the context going as I look, that's not a huge deal. Sometimes it's an opening to a more synchronous conversation and then it's less of a big deal because we're gonna be going back and forth with quick messages. Part of the irritation is you can still just always open a message with "Hey, something something something" and keep it all in one.

The problem is people who send a lone "Hey" and then... nothing.

Some will wait for you to say respond with your own greeting (which is all you can respond with because you don't know what you're even talking about yet). Other's don't wait but do delay and the initial greeting was just a warning or something that a "real" message is incoming. I've had folks ping me the "Hey" and then I respond immediately with a "Hey" (to stave off the above "permission to speak" people) and they get distracted and say nothing else for 10 minutes.

Some will message you while you're busy, so you don't respond to their "Hi". You then respond to it a half hour later with the only thing you can say to that contextless message: "Hey, what's up?". Only now maybe they are busy, and they respond again to you a half hour after that. You've had a conversation "opening" for an hour for what purpose?

Some will immediately begin typing out a gigantic block of text and you are sitting there waiting while the "XX is typing" message unwaveringly sits at the bottom. Bonus points here if they were editing and revising as they went and you get an eight word sentence after what appeared to be 3 minutes of continuous typing.

Some will do all of those things so you end up having your attention taken multiple times for minutes at a time for a message that realistically might take you a couple seconds to read, parse, and respond to if it had been sent all at once.

Typing "hey commandlinefan where is your list of ssh shortcuts?" is the best, as it's polite (could be politer I assume but it's not just a give me), and it gets you everything you need to know to answer (or if you do) right there. Maybe doing military style with "most important" first would be nicer "ssh shortcuts - hey commandlinefan, where's the list" but that's a minor thing.

Typing "hey"

and then "where's the ssh shortcuts" in quick succession isn't as great (buzzes the phone twice perhaps) but at least by the time you look at it you see what's needed.

Typing "hey"

and not adding anything more until you get "hello" back - this is what drives people up the wall. It's adding a SYN/ACK on top of TCP/IP and greatly slows down chat communications. I've had a "hello" and then immediately replied "hey" and then not heard anything for hours.

The “No hello” ethos in chat goes back to at least 2005. This is not a new thing at all, it’s just the industry is constantly being refreshed with young workers who learn anew what many people understood well over a decade ago.

If you say hey and immediately follow up with your message, that's fine.

If you say hey, wait for a reply, and only then start with your actual question, that comes off as very annoying.

"Hi, I have following question. Blah blah" is fine.

But

  - Hi
  - <2 min pause and typing icon appears. I wait doing nothing or get to work>
  - I have a question about X.
  - <4 min pause and typing icon appears, as person struggles to write it. I wait doing nothing or get to work>

And only after you get question. That was too much waiting idle, being interrupted and still not communicating.

Well yeah, but if it's a quick question then it's just reading & replying once, it's a "hey" and you engage with it, it's a longer context switch. For both parties involved; the sender obviously has something they need you for, the faster they can have that issue resolved, the faster their context switch has finished.

I think it’s actually pretty silly. The same people demanding you no-hello them (that is, try to enforce a social solution on everyone else to solve something they can easily solve technically) will also tell you to e.g. use an as blocker, or go on about Postel’s law.

If a random slack message is going to ruin your concentration, that’s a you problem. Fix it on your end.

I agree, it doesn’t especially bother me. But if I don’t want notifications, I mute them. I don’t demand other people accommodate my inability to manage my own attention.

My favorite is when I get not just "hey" but "hey, how's it going?". It's one more step further removed from whatever the actual question is.

It is particularly problematic when the other person in a significantly different timezone to the point that you have no synchronous overlap. I work with coworkers in India and we are 12.5/11.5 hours apart.

When they send me a ‘hello’ message and nothing else, that immediately becomes a much slower interaction. I won’t be able to see and react until the next day. They won’t be able clarify the nature of their inquiry until the following day. I need to remember to come back to see what they wanted on the third day. That is slow motion torture and very inefficient communication.

Just send “Hi, could you you give the the location of the xyz document?” Or “Hello, I was working on ticket 101 and did not understand the second paragraph of the requirement, could you expand on that so I know what needs to be done, please?”. that is something that I can help with and give a much faster turn around on.

if it was good enough to get the idea across in order to be corrected, it succeeded.

grammar is fake. language is made up, didn't you know?

pithy response aside, i work with a lot of ESL international folks, caring about grammar comes _way_ after being gracious in communication.

edit: also, period goes inside quote, even with ellipses. https://writingcenter.uagc.edu/ellipses. secondly, the extra comma before "as well" is unecessary. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/231256/can-i-put...

If "less" is used more often than "fewer", doesn't that mean these fairly arbitrary grammar rules should be updated? Language evolves, after all, and American English has diverged from UK English a long time ago.

>Replace short follow-up messages with emoji reactions" -> don't do anything when it's not needed.

I feel compelled to thank people after they've helped me. Thank you emails feel burdensome. Emoji responses are a happy medium. (You don't get notifications from emoji responses right? I've never used Slack)

I hate emoji reactions. I understand that not everybody will view them the same way, but to me they're phony - if I've helped you, say thanks - don't send a thumbs up emoji.

And recognize that in large group settings, maybe a response isn't necessary - I'm sure a lot of people get annoyed by the flood of "thanks!" "good bye" and such messages that get sent at the end of large meetings.

Takes time to be concise: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

It's a trade off between comprehension and ease of distillation made easier if you know your audience well.

If you take the time to ease comprehension then ALL who read it save time. But how much of your time will save how much of theirs?

Of course it's not.

At my place we use :eyes: for I'm looking at it, but feel free to also look, and a custom emoji of the word "onit" for I'm taking responsibility for it.

There are also dedicated "thank you" and "done" emojis which feel great to see appear or to post, due to the unambiguous positive terminal message.

that broom sound is the worst. compare this to the sounds available on apple systems. in the directory /System/Library/Sounds: Funk, Morse, Blow.

Slack has a really nice popup that blocks this from happening by mistake, and confirms you really want to do it.

(Also, @here is a great alternative because it only notifies people actively on Slack.)

"After hours" means different things to different people. Just set up your DnD settings and let people message when and how they want, and then reply when and how you want.

While @channel is generally rude (unless it's something really urgent, and even then that's better solved by having one person specifically be interruptible for urgent questions), it's even better to just not check Slack after hours.

Don't @channel large channels ever.

> however slack is almost an anti-knowledge base in it's current state

I know that Slack isn't a replacement for some kind of knowledge base but the Slack search is incredibly powerful and I'm answering questions by using the search almost every day.

Not every social problem needs to have a tech solution. Slack allows sending messages between people. They don't need to start policing the content of these messages.

Teaching people to replace "<send>" with ", " is better than trying to design a filter for every salutation.

It would be great to see Slack put some work in here, but could someone make an app (or Slackbot) to enforce/offer guidance?

I know Slack culture can be hugely variable over time, especially for high-growth companies so there definitely needs to be some flexibility.

All of this is possible to do via custom bots. Ultimately there's no single standard Slack can enforce that will work for all of their users, so it's best to stay as lightweight as possible when it comes to stuff like etiquette.

This... is an insane take. It's "humiliating" for you to use the communication platform your company has chosen?

Curious, in what way is it humiliation?

You must be fun to work with. Slack and similar are just tools. Caring about whether they are proprietary or not is lower down on the stack of priorities for most of us.