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Collaborate with kindness: Etiquette tips in Slack

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Re: Collaborate with kindness: Etiquette tips in Slack

#11

Post by ninkendo »

commandlinefan wrote: post #4

> Never send a direct message that just says “hey” or “hello.” 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 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…”

Re: Collaborate with kindness: Etiquette tips in Slack

#13

Post by _moof »

commandlinefan wrote: post #4

> Never send a direct message that just says “hey” or “hello.” 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…

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.

Re: Collaborate with kindness: Etiquette tips in Slack

#14

Post by maccard »

> Write longer messages that scan quickly

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.

Re: Collaborate with kindness: Etiquette tips in Slack

#16

Post by richm31415 »

gkoberger wrote: post #5
enriquto wrote: post #3

Basic etiquette would be to not force co-workers to use Slack at all. And for that matter, any other proprietary network based on closed standards that do not admit connections from third-party clients. I'm forced to use Slack and Zoom from time to time for important work stuff, and it is extremely annoying and humiliating.

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

It can be, yes. For someone who is a strong believer in and advocate of FOSS, who makes her/his livelihood developing FOSS for a FOSS software company, to be forced to use proprietary solutions where there are reasonable FOSS alternatives can be very disheartening, demoralizing, and even humiliating.

Re: Collaborate with kindness: Etiquette tips in Slack

#17

Post by micromacrofoot »

enriquto wrote: post #3

Basic etiquette would be to not force co-workers to use Slack at all. And for that matter, any other proprietary network based on closed standards that do not admit connections from third-party clients. I'm forced to use Slack and Zoom from time to time for important work stuff, and it is extremely annoying and humiliating.

Curious, in what way is it humiliation?

Re: Collaborate with kindness: Etiquette tips in Slack

#19

Post by _moof »

> …the recipient gets a notification on that first “hey” that contains no information and potentially causes distraction. The person might see the indicator that you’re typing but is still left waiting for your full message.

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.

Re: Collaborate with kindness: Etiquette tips in Slack

#20

Post by npunt »

Rather than just tell / hope people follow some etiquette, I'd love Slack to build more etiquette enforcing features that operators could enable.

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.

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