Slack is not the problem nor the solution to productive collaboration

I am a fan of Slack, Hipchat and Discord. Any tool implemented in the right way and managed towards the defined goal is great!

Many companies lacking productive collaboration think that implementing a real time messaging system is the solution to everything. ??

My communication rules within my teams are:

1. If it is urgent as in "I need to speak to you right now": Call the person, Skype them, Go to their desks, find them!
2. If it is important but it can wait some hours: Text (slack, or similar)
3. If it can wait a day: mail them
4. If it is FYI and there are more people interested in the same topic find a good place to share the link versus sending a mail to 10 people with an article. For example a slack channel defined for that or edit the confluence page with the new insights.

So far, it sounds like common sense. But indeed there are many grey areas... and how you deal with those wil define if you company will glow ??, on collaboration excellence or sink with inefficient workload ?? .

Grey Areas:

Task oriented conversations:

Those are best captured under Asana, Trello, Jira or any similar system but not email and not Slack. Make sure your capture relevant info, decisions, and doubts in that ticket. Exceptions:

• You are in the middle of a task and need real time communication. For example you are going live with a release and several people need to be updated, great place for a slack channel where every one gets updates continuously about progress and issues.
• You are trying to get a status of everyone, like a stand up but asynchronous (not everyone works in the same time zone). Then a daily stand up channel, may be makes more sense, every one states what they will do today in a text line. No need to have stand ups with 15+ people if the only one that benefits of the update is the lead person. Spotify started doing something like this to avoid inefficient stand ups.
• For some tasks that are more like workshops, like figuring out gaps in the google analytics implementation of your app, you may want to do a call and everyone checks behind their computer their own things, code, documentation, tableau dashboards, newsletter tools etc. The advantage is you can discover, fix an document tasks on the fly by just remotely talking to each other.
• You are creating a power point or word doc. For me google docs is the best, you have this feature to open conversations and tickets around sentences words and chapters in a document and it makes it easy for everyone to reply under those, collaborate and close tickets once a decision is made by the document owner. Nothing is worse than receiving 15 emails from people with feedback and trying to make sense of it. Guide them all to a google docs and edit there.

Team building

Slack and similar can be great for team building, you can have a coffee room where people share jokes, or random things. Fun is important in life and even more at work. So the use of gifs, smileys and other great plug ins makes it a great tool to break the ice, specially when you are on the go, by sharing images of your work trip through slack with your other colleagues. For example, some of us visited our supplier in Poland and shared videos and pictures of our trip on our slack channel, the rest of the team felt "involved". Others went to a conference and did the same, sharing interesting slides pictures or else with the rest of the team is good. By choosing the right channel you give people and option to read or not, and decide when they will read. And no mater if they read it or not, they will feel the love of you caring for them, sharing is caring some say ;-).

Other uses can be for example, if you have a remote team and you use discord you can all jump into the voice channel and have a little break or even lunch together. You can have a standard day and time where you encourage the team to be there.

Exceptions: No mater if you are remote or not, team building events need to exist on top of digital boosters.

Emergency Situations

When facing emergency situations, slack is great, everyone is connected and receiving status real time wether on mobile or desktop. Great for event management or similar.

It does not need to be a dangerous situation it can be also something like: your sales rep is at the customer and the customer request something were he or she has no access too at that moment, he/she pings the rest of the team via slack asking, can someone send me this video or x document so I can show it to the customer? if he is lucky the first one seeing the message will send it, if she/he is not then he will need to tell the customer it will be sent later, but obviously some momentum may be lost.

Just be aware that philosophical discussions about strategy, good ideas on what to do or not to do with some areas of your business are not an emergency situation.

We all are more and more lazy and feel that sharing a link and letting the rest of the team figure out what to do with it, is the most productive way to work: well it is not... Streamline relevant conversations into a task:

• someone needs to research XYZ and others can collaborate with that person (asana)
• you make a task out of a link, please implement this in our system right now (that can be a slack emergency)

You of course can create a channel that is specifically for those R&D and FYI links, but do not expect people to take action on those. If the way you work is that every time you post something on slack everyone is switching task, then you will create too much distractions.

Alerts

There are different types of alerts, some need a phone call, sms, email and other can for sure use a slack channel. The advantage of slack is that you can define which channels you want push notifications from. There are great plug ins for slack and there are several automated tasks you can stream towards a channel that can make live easy for you, versus having to log in in several systems to do or check the same (specially useful when on mobile).

Conclusion

The same way I feel that having meetings for everything (or calls) is not a solution to productive collaboration implementing slack or similar isn't either.

You need to structure and manage communication and collaboration practices actively so you get the business results desired.

You will not get it right the first time, so iterate and measure till you find what works for your organisation.