4 Tips to Improve Your Slack Experience

The Slack notification sound: We know it, we love it, and sometimes it haunts our nightmares.

I think we all have a right to be a little skeptical, especially with our career success on the line. I mean, at the end of the day, isn’t Slack just the great-grandchild of MSN Chat, or worse… BBM? Would you trust your 2009 BlackBerry with the fate of your career success?

Slack’s daily active user count crossed the 12 million mark last year, and is still growing today. In classic internet fashion, this has brought a slew of haters writing blasphemous slander on message boards and reddit threads alike making every team ever rethink their Slack-leaning decisions.

Popular articles such as Death By a Thousand Pings: The Hidden Side of Using Slack,” and Slack Wants to Replace Email. Is That What We Want?” have entire remote workforces debating whether Slack is the right messaging tool for them. With everyone’s email inbox looking like that one junk drawer you have full of paperclips and loose rubber bands, it’s so much less stressful to just shoot someone a message knowing that it will be received instantaneously, aggressively and with a signature cLaCK CLAck cLaCk.

Collaboration tools have become the central hub of productivity. With Microsoft Teams, Google G Suite, Facebook Workplace to contend with, Slack has done an admirable job keeping up with these moguls. It’s no wonder in-office and wfh employees alike both find Slack to be useful and effective for maintaining workplace relationships.

Uvaro has been using Slack since our decision to move fully remote and it’s been great… until sometimes it isn’t. It’s easy to get burn out, to lose productivity, or to want to pull your hair out when the #uvaro-cat-moms” channel pops up with eighteen new unread messages.

But remember the junk drawer? We can’t go back to email. We can never go back.

After some VERY serious research (i.e., talking to three colleagues and having my boss give this article a once over) we started implementing a few rules on our team to solve a lot of our big Slack-based stressors. It has honestly made the Slack experience a million times more bearable.

In the interest of spreading the joy, here are 4 complaints I’ve heard come out of my teammate’s mouths, and what exactly you can do to avoid hearing those things from YOUR teammates mouths:

We have too many different channels.

I’ve lost track of what I’m subscribed to. Like, what even is #sandras-new-baby? Why is that its own channel?

When Drift audited their Slack, they were shocked — and I can only imagine HORRIFIED – to discover they had over 950 channels. There are fewer GORILLAS ON EARTH than there are Drift Slack channels. You could check a different channel every day for two years and STILL not clear your notifications.

Solution: Minimize

Do a routine decluttering by leaving any channels that are not relevant to your job or you’ve lost interest in. Slack recommends setting up the main channels according to three main uses:

• Teams - #marketing
• Projects - #writing-genius-article-about-slack
• Functions - #sharing-slack-articles

And then adopting a naming convention across the board. For example you use a [TEAM]-[ACTION]-[ITEM] approach which would allow everyone to see a clearer picture of the channels they are subscribed to and why they are subscribed to them:

• #marketing-feedback-articles
• #product-sharing-inspiration
• #fun-sharing-sandrasbaby

I can never find the information I’m looking for.

Sandra won’t stop talking about her baby! Once, I had to ask a question SEVEN TIMES since it kept getting lost.

Did you know Slack stands for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge”? Yeah, it made me existential too. When people don’t know where to find the information they need, they often turn to a chat. The same questions can get asked over and over, docs and resources get lost, and everyone ends up spamming the channel while the chosen ones” spend hours responding and getting their days derailed.

Solution: Take it outside Slack

What? You can do that? Heck yes you can! For FAQs and overarching systems and processes, your playbook is a good place to start, since it captures all the tips and tricks you need in a clear and concise place. If a conversation is taking longer than 10 minutes, it’s probably a better idea to hop on a call to save time. No shame in the zoom game. If messaging in threads, and tagging people directly is still leaving your Slack looking like a toddler smashed your keyboard with his tiny toddler-fists, then an email could be your saving grace.

There's too much play, and not enough work.

I know too much about Sandra’s baby… I don’t even really work with Sandra, and I definitely don’t care about her baby.”

It can be really hard to connect with your team remotely. Gone are the days of holiday eggnog and awkward Friday-night karaoke. Slack can be the perfect place to connect, with add-ons like Donut, or Trivia. Water cooler banter can bring teams closer together, and if you can’t get the hot work goss from your colleagues over drinks and nachos in person, Slack can be the next best virtual thing. But when conversations repeatedly veer too far away from topic, and you’ve spent an hour sending bitmojis back and forth, things start to feel less fun, and more crying-in-bathroom.

Solution: Set some guidelines

You can do it yourself by making sure to KonMari which channels you really want to join, and leaving those which do not spark joy. Upper management can also help in that regard by setting clear policies and best practices for Slack communication across the org. Ask them when you should email vs. message, the workplace expectations for responding, sharing and mentions etc…, and how to contact someone urgently if their status is set to away.” Even if a written policy isn’t put in place, discussing best practices and defining boundaries within the team will benefit everyone and minimize bathroom-crying.

There are so many notifications at all hours of the day.

Slack keeps waking up my newborn. She’s so cute when she’s asleep. Do you want to see a picture?

There’s a drawback to making communication as easy as sending a message through Slack: it becomes easy to send too many messages or messages outside of work hours. When it’s right there on your mobile device, you may receive non-stop notifications – and feel obligated to respond to them right away.

Solution: Take it outside Slack

Most responses can wait. If it’s mission-critical, they will find another way to reach you. Talk to your colleagues about expectations to establish a better work-life balance and avoid the passive aggressive ?” five minutes after the original message. Don’t be afraid to turn off notifications, mute a channel, flip on Do Not Disturb” mode, or if you’re feeling spicy, set a custom status. More than that, Slack now has a new feature that allows you to set your timezone and input your work hours. That way, even if you’re working internationally, your coworkers will be notified when they’re messaging you during your downtime. You don’t even have to guilt them with a as per your last message,” notif because Slack will do it for you.

Mark my words, Slack can make or break a team’s spirit. If you do nothing else, set up some guidelines around how you’ll use Slack within your organization, and what you aim to get out of it. Companies are quick to jump on board when a new tech trend emerges yet forget to ask themselves how these tools will fit into their workflow. When you’re not sure how you’ll use that tech, the results can be frustrating and counterproductive.

It’s up to you to dictate how to best use the tool, and not let the tool use you. If you let Slack run amok, then we get into Black Mirror territory and next thing you know, we’re all underlings to the Donut app that rules our lives forcing us to meet for daily coffee every twenty minutes.

Don’t fear Slack, let Slack fear you. Set your boundaries, organize yourself and communicate with clarity and empathy. Remember, there are people — your workplace allies, in fact — on the other side of the clack-clack-clacking.

If you're a Uvaro member enrolled in one of our many tech sales courses and you're looking for some more Slack tips and tricks, check out one of our past articles, like: Slack Etiquette For New Sales Reps.