I have tried so hard to get people to do this, but it seems like a lot of my coworkers are honestly scared of "public" channels, and by "public" I mean a channel with only 15 or so people on it. They insist on DM'ing most things, and some just refuse to use chat at all; those will only communicate via email.
I know for a fact that anonymity can be used to encourage diversity of thought and honesty on public channels - this is the feedback I get from customers of a service I run (https://AnonymityBot.com).
Only if that room enables people to only hear shouts that include their name, where they can pause hearing shouts, where it's acceptable to ignore shouts if you're busy, and where there's someone recording the shouts in case someone has a similar problem later.
In fact, in almost all the ways that matter it's entirely different to shouting in a room.
So I turned off all notifications on Slack. The only way I know I have a message is the red dot that appears in the panel icon.
Now, it's async again. When I even glance up to see if there are new messages... Red dot or no red dot
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.
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.
I do hate it though. Just ask the damn question, don't wait for me to say "hey" back.
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.
Threads are where messages go to die. I don’t have time to read every single thread clicking into it individually. You’re just making work for me, having to figure out what threads I have to read. If it’s in a thread and no one @‘d me, assume I missed it. I read very quickly, I just want to be able to scan all messages in a channel chronologically.
My team begrudgingly moved over from an IRC server about two years ago to the larger corporations Slack and have actively avoided threads in our spaces.
What they should add is an optional unrolled thread view where people can use threads but we can still get the whole thing as a single non-hierarchical timeline I can just scroll, akin to how Signal does replying to specific messages.
Bonus tip: it’s not available on mobile which means I now basically never check Slack from my phone. I can’t decide if the Slack devs are hopelessly overworked or genius for _still_ not offering it on mobile. Check the time stamp: https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/798631873911980032
The corner of the page: "Hey friend, got a minute to chat"
ha!
I first started hearing people suggest this recently (within the past month or so). I never really understood why these message bothered people so much - they never bothered me and always actually seemed a bit more polite than just barreling forward with a question. But I guess if even Slack themselves are saying don't do that, it must really get on other people's nerves.
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…”
But for sure it is annoying when someone sends me a message that says "Hi" and then says nothing else until I respond
Personally I love the "Hi! Do you have a moment?". "Well, now I have...". Usually the following question will take the rest of my day at least. :-)
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.
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".
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>
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.
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.
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 you say hey, wait for a reply, and only then start with your actual question, that comes off as very annoying.
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.
I think this should be "Fewer messages...". Good grammar improves communication, as well.
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...
According to Wikipedia, it very much depends: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Punc...
You quote a US website for this, but we're talking about English.
- "1. Never send a direct message that just says “hey” or “hello.", write longer messages -> use email.
- "2. "Write longer messages that scan quickly" -> don't use a chat app for your messages, use email.
- "3. Use threads for effective team collaboration. Seriously." -> use a mailing list.
- "4. Replace short follow-up messages with emoji reactions" -> don't do anything when it's not needed.
- "5. Reduce off-hours pings with Do Not Disturb" -> set up a mail responder.
etc etc
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)
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.
I do a lot of work with people who are not working at the same time I am so keeping communications clear and contained is helpful.
I like this one. I'm an emoji fan, but understand that not everyone else is.
It boils down to "spend time crafting a message that contains the correct information" or even more succinctly "respect other people's time".
There's nothing worse than a giant wall of text with all the pertinent information buried in the middle of it.
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?
There's definitely a tradeoff to be had here, and it's up to you to decide. I err on the side of over-editing in work/professional communications (and likely under-editing on social media), out of courtesy for the people reading what I'm saying!
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.
Don't @channel large channels after hours!
(Also, @here is a great alternative because it only notifies people actively on Slack.)
Yes, email and ticket systems have drawbacks, 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.
I would turn this around and call this a product design problem. Maybe Slack shouldn't send a notification when all you've said is "hey" and you're typing a follow-up message.
Really, if you have to publish a blog post explaining to people that they're using your product wrong, I'd say your product needs work.
This isn't the 19th century where the best we can do is tell people to read a book on etiquette and hope for the best. Slack is in a unique position in the history of interpersonal communication where they have complete insight into (and design of) user's and organization's preferences as well as the messages themselves. And the medium is text, which is the easiest to analyze and provide feedback on.
Some examples of what they could do, broadly captured in a 'Etiquette Features' preference set by the organization:
1. Never say 'hey' - if a user writes this, explain the etiquette and rationale for it and suggest they write a whole ass message instead, but optionally let the user just send it.
2. Make long messages scan easily - not too difficult for a computer to tell a long block of unformatted text. Great time to introduce the etiquette scaffold.
3. Use threads - a trickier one to suggest when people are typing, but likely some obvious response patterns (who & when messages are sent) that could trigger a etiquette scaffold asking to put this message in the thread if messages are similar enough to the thread's contents.
4. Short followups as emojis - orgs should be able to define clear meaning of response emojis that are visualized to everyone in the UI when selecting them (check means complete, question mark means need more info, etc). Short responses also likely have a pattern that could trigger a 'do you mean 'this is done'?' kind of scaffold, which would fill in emoji instead
6. Channel response expectations - a tiny text label is insufficient to set expectations, as are pinned messages. At the very least visualize timezones of participants, and when writing an @message to someone in a channel, if they're off-hours let the sender know that up front.
All our communications tools favor low friction to send and devalue the recipients time (the phenomenon mentioned in Cal Newport's Deep Work), and Slack is a serious offender. There's a need for a higher friction, higher awareness path to send messages that better accounts for the full cost of such messages. Not every org would want/need this but it should absolutely be something a service like Slack offers.
I know Slack culture can be hugely variable over time, especially for high-growth companies so there definitely needs to be some flexibility.
One could say the same for code style - it's hugely variable as more people come onto the team, but with linters a particular standardization of style can be followed.
My post is basically asking: what if we had etiquette linters?
And for about 98% of orgs, building a bot to enforce conventions is definitely not getting prioritised above BAU or project work.
If you're in a position like Slack where you have control over defaults, small changes like the introduction of some default etiquette options that orgs can adopt can have massive leverage in improving comms, which ultimately would benefit the product and users.
Besides, I don't work for a company, but in the public sector (which by the way I think it should not impose non-free software nor secret protocols into the citizens).
Usenet netiquette, mail netiquette etc are not wrote by someone up front but slowly formed by a community of users out of their experience. My own personal etiquette for Slack is: "sorry I do not use proprietary platforms, seen no reason for them, we have emails, chats, etc choosing a deliberate security risk is not a good policy for a company, as a sysadmin I can't take responsibility for it and so I can't even use it".
Personally I consider a third-party propritary digital communication tool a security threat on it's own, since the third party might audit anything and I can't tell if that's happen or not, that's why I classify similarly Slack, Zoom, Meet, Teams, O365 etc.
I consider chat-based coms something useful in another era, when we can't just make VoIP calls, or still useful if you need to reach a remote ship or submarine via very expensive and limited sat/LF coms (classic telex), definitely wrong otherwise.
My coms are simple: you need to reach me quickly? Call me, classic SIP/RTP. It's not urgent? Send me a mail, a plain text one with a romance quoted multiple times or a signature longer then the message itself. Try to be "more connected" means trying to be distracted and less productive.
Need to send me files? I hope any company do have a decent DMS also for file sharing purposes.
Need to share the screen? Ok, call me and we do
etc.
Right tool for the right job. About working with me practically: for most who know me it's not an issue, and my productivity tend to be far above the average, for newcomers seems not hyper-nice to start, but it's a short time period.