That is one of the worst examples of censoring names I've seen in an article. I have to laugh that the example HBR give is for an anonymous "midsize media company", when it is actually them. (e.g. Emily Ryan, product manager, Robert Black, etc, all HBR employees)
What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
11–20 of 50 posts
Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
#12I love our company's internal slack for all the reasons listed in the article. Though we haven't reached the size that we'd actually need it (small company). We did decide to pay for it for the unlimited searching of archives. It is also nice because it gives me a permanent URL pointing to discussions that I can put in issues or commit messages.
But the first thing I do when I install slack anywhere is turn off all the notifications (or disallow them).
Letting anyone interrupt my thinking anywhere? No thanks.
Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
#13For those who use Slack at work:
Do you often use old conversations that your teammates have had to solve problems? Do you search Slack to find it? I've never been in a large Slack team and I'm curious how many people actually do that.
Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
#14For those who use Slack at work: Do you often use old conversations that your teammates have had to solve problems? Do you search Slack to find it? I've never been in a large Slack team and I'm curious how many people actually do that.
I absolutely do, it's invaluable to be able to reference old conversations for wisdom that hasn't made it into documentation.
Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
#15Slack's "pay to search archives" feature is really ingenious. What content will people pay for? Content that they created!
Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
#16For those who use Slack at work: Do you often use old conversations that your teammates have had to solve problems? Do you search Slack to find it? I've never been in a large Slack team and I'm curious how many people actually do that.
I absolutely do, it's invaluable to be able to reference old conversations for wisdom that hasn't made it into documentation.
Cool. Do you find it easy to locate? I've struggled with their search at times.
Also, do you end up extracting conversations into docs, or something that's easier to share with your team?
Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
#17I can understand the points about social aspects at work, but some of the content concerning more tangible business benefits seems too idealistic. e.g. "I suddenly remembered that I’d seen a communication exchanged between these two guys.." -- how often do you happen to remember seeing that kind of conversation? Imagine these tools are barely making a dent in the amount of duplication and lack of "metaknowledge" that goes on in any mid to large sized company. And that comes with the oft-cited costs of distractions, etc. Or am I just using them wrong?
Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I absolutely do, it's invaluable to be able to reference old conversations for wisdom that hasn't made it into documentation.
Cool. Do you find it easy to locate? I've struggled with their search at times. Also, do you end up extracting conversations into docs, or something that's easier to share with your team?
"I've struggled with their search at times."
While you personally may already know this, and this doesn't solve all problems; be sure to look for and read the tiny little mostly-greyed-out link to the search syntax for Slack: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/202528808-Search-in... , in particular the "Use search modifiers" section. Slack defaults to a nearly-useless search if you don't feed it things like a channel limitation or something.
Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool. Do you find it easy to locate? I've struggled with their search at times. Also, do you end up extracting conversations into docs, or something that's easier to share with your team?
"I've struggled with their search at times." While you personally may already know this, and this doesn't solve all problems; be sure to look for and read the tiny little mostly-greyed-out link to the search syntax for Slack: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/202528808-Search-in... , in particular the "Use search modifiers" section. Slack defaults to a nearly-useless search if you don't feed it things like a c…
Great point, I don't use these nearly enough. Thanks!
Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
#20I'm not sure how effective or distributed the best knowledgebase softwares are (ours is OneNote and it isn't working IMO), but I think having the knowledge at your fingertips would be far less distracting than a minimum of two people occupying each other's mental resources long enough to exchange IP. Then what if people leave and take the IP with them. Have there been studies specifically measuring distractability or overall work performance with/without distracting instant messaging...? I'm not convinced these IM tools are the answer, but maybe with some sort of "Guide"/KB integration coupled with ML.