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Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#91

Post by irrational »

don-code wrote: post #23
bluehatbrit wrote: post #9

In previous teams I've worked hard to make sure slack isn't the place for decisions to be made that are any greater than where to go for lunch. Same with bigger questions as well. Slack is great for small insignificant chatter but developers need long uninterrupted periods of quiet to work. That doesn't go well with an IM system that people expect to get big questions answered or key decisions made with. If the team…

> Slack prioritises whoever is first to reply and no one wants to read a 50+ message thread to figure out if they have relevant input. My personal belief is that Slack provides a perverse incentive to reply quickly, rather than thoughtfully. There's a time and place for quick communications, but the majority of discussions I have over Slack feel that they'd be better served by thoughtful requests with equally (if not…

It might incentivize it, but you don’t have to give in to the incentive. I turn off slack when I am heads down working. When I am using slack, I try to leave a few minutes in between my responses so the other person can add more if they wish as they are given more time to think. It also helps to train people to not expect an immediate response from me like they might get from text messaging.

Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#92

Post by nlnn »

bluehatbrit wrote: post #9

In previous teams I've worked hard to make sure slack isn't the place for decisions to be made that are any greater than where to go for lunch. Same with bigger questions as well. Slack is great for small insignificant chatter but developers need long uninterrupted periods of quiet to work. That doesn't go well with an IM system that people expect to get big questions answered or key decisions made with. If the team…

Any tips on making sure that Slack isn't the place for important decisions?

We're facing this problem at the moment, with Slack being heavily used for almost everything.

Main difficulty is changing culture around its use - there are plenty alternatives that we push people towards, but they tend to get ignored in favour of Slack since asking is easier there.

Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#93

Post by jesterson »

bluehatbrit wrote: post #9

In previous teams I've worked hard to make sure slack isn't the place for decisions to be made that are any greater than where to go for lunch. Same with bigger questions as well. Slack is great for small insignificant chatter but developers need long uninterrupted periods of quiet to work. That doesn't go well with an IM system that people expect to get big questions answered or key decisions made with. If the team…

This is excellent writeup I could have made, but @bluehatbrit made it much better.

Slack is very distracting. I surprise some people saying I am pushing every meaningful convo out of slack and hopefully one day to completely scrap it and throw away.

Emails are way better since it pushes people to think the problem first, and you'll be surprised how many problems have found solution before "Send" button is pressed.

It's easier to just send something like "Hiyo Mark, hihi! Wazzup?". This is where it gets dangerous to performance and focus.

Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#94

Post by whiskyagogo »

dicknuckle wrote: post #65
metadat wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree 100%, slack is the wrong tool for the job in this case. Your proposal is a cool idea, and there are even self-hostable FOSS clones available. See: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2267/are-there-any-...

I haven't read too far into those, but if one has an integration or feature to automatically send a message to the team's Slack channel with a link to every new Local SO post, it could really light the fire on that new system. Then all the replies would be easier to capture on the SO post, AND eyes would be on the new posts, AND it wouldn't be cluttering inboxes.

I’m in the process of identifying communication gaps in my org and possible tooling and process solutions. Stack Overflow for Teams is high on my list of tools to evaluate and it feels like a Slack integration would be important so your comment finally prompted me to look into it.

It turns out there’s an official integration that looks pretty comprehensive: https://stackoverflow.co/teams/integrations/slack/

Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#96

Post by muzani »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #50

Email is the best method of communication for anything complex. It's asynchronous, long-form, has a historical record, allows threading, you can seamlessly include anyone in the world in the conversation, have shared mailboxes and mailing lists, attach files. But people are afraid of e-mail. Will anyone ever read my e-mail? When will I get a response? What if I mess up my message? It is unknown, immutable, does not p…

I don't miss email. One of the immediate benefits of Slack is someone can give a notice via Slack and the receiver can callback with an "acknowledged" or "noted".

The callback is very important IMO because things get lost in email all the time. And yet you don't want 5 people to reply "noted".

Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#97

Post by bluehatbrit »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #63
bluehatbrit wrote: post #9

In previous teams I've worked hard to make sure slack isn't the place for decisions to be made that are any greater than where to go for lunch. Same with bigger questions as well. Slack is great for small insignificant chatter but developers need long uninterrupted periods of quiet to work. That doesn't go well with an IM system that people expect to get big questions answered or key decisions made with. If the team…

> Slack prioritises whoever is first to reply and no one wants to read a 50+ message thread to figure out if they have relevant input. But they want to read a long e-mail thread?

Not nessesarily, but it tends to be slower moving and each element in the thread tends to be larger and better thought through. I find this means they tend to end up shorter as a result when you skip all the email signatures. There's also less sense of urgency to reply as well meaning you can set aside some time rather than feeling like you're missing out on the slack thread which may still be moving.

Other tools can work as well like shared documents if the content/context is several pages or something.

Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#98

Post by bluehatbrit »

nlnn wrote: post #92
bluehatbrit wrote: post #9

In previous teams I've worked hard to make sure slack isn't the place for decisions to be made that are any greater than where to go for lunch. Same with bigger questions as well. Slack is great for small insignificant chatter but developers need long uninterrupted periods of quiet to work. That doesn't go well with an IM system that people expect to get big questions answered or key decisions made with. If the team…

Any tips on making sure that Slack isn't the place for important decisions? We're facing this problem at the moment, with Slack being heavily used for almost everything. Main difficulty is changing culture around its use - there are plenty alternatives that we push people towards, but they tend to get ignored in favour of Slack since asking is easier there.

I think it really depends on your team and your position within the team. For me it was just a case of pointing out that people feel under pressure to respond and it's making it harder to focus. It was a genuine problem within the team that lots of people were feeling so it wasn't really news to anyone. Then it was just a case of being the one to start noticing topics that are larger and pushing them out of slack. "This feels like it might need some team wide input, Phil, can you do a summary in an email and send it around?" or something along those lines.

I suppose it's important to say don't be militant about it and allow discussions to happen a bit to really see if they're shallow or deep topics. Shallow topics are fine for slack because you probably only need a couple people's input. Deep topics where you specifically want the whole team are the ones you want to pull into something slower moving.

Trying to change habbit is tricky so it's a case of slow errosion of the old habbit with the new one. Eventually the team started to make those kind of calls themselves, and newer team members picked it up quickly as well.

Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#99

Post by bluehatbrit »

taeric wrote: post #83
bluehatbrit wrote: post #9

In previous teams I've worked hard to make sure slack isn't the place for decisions to be made that are any greater than where to go for lunch. Same with bigger questions as well. Slack is great for small insignificant chatter but developers need long uninterrupted periods of quiet to work. That doesn't go well with an IM system that people expect to get big questions answered or key decisions made with. If the team…

I don't fully disagree, but I do disagree that I want all decisions done in a long format. Especially when I'm specifically trying to get my team to be way more agile and willing to make decisions while they are working. Throwing up a quick discussion point on a slack room while you are acting on the idea is perfectly fine. Just as it could be perfectly fine to toss the code if the idea doesn't pan out.

That's fair enough! I don't think it's about completely eliminating all decisions from happening in slack. It's just the one's OP was talking about where they would benefit from the whole team having the opportunity to consider the topic and give their input. Smaller decisions which only require the input of a few members of the team and shallow conversation I think are fine to be had in slack, that's where slack works really well.

I think a bit of it boils down to each team being different as well, if you need a team to be more agile then using slack more might be the right thing. In OP's case they sound like they need their team to slow down and consider some things more deeply and slowly. In that case pushing those topics out of slack may make sense.

Re: Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

#100

Post by presentation »

Our team has discussions on Slack but strictly in threads (NOT in DMs), and we try to tag anyone who ought to be aware ASAP. If it gets too complicated to hash out in a chat then we'll get on a call. Either way, it's a requirement that once the dust has settled, someone summarizes the discussion into a document in a shared Notion page for these discussions, links it as a reply to the thread (also posted to the channel), with clear action items that have arisen from it. Works alright for us.
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