Slack and Productivity: best practices
Slack is a wonderful tool for collaboration and synchronous communication both internally and externally. The use cases are numerous:
- Chat with your team
- Exchange with all employees
- Create automated alerts to notify the sales team of a new lead
- Automate the creation of a message in a dedicated channel when a post is published on social networks from the Company pages.
- Quickly create surveys to get everyone's opinion.
- And so on...
But Slack can also be a disruptive tool that affects employee productivity and focus. Too many notifications, an incentive to ask rather than search for yourself, a red dot on the corner of the app that throws off the flow.
This is why we have drawn up guidelines that will enable you to improve the quality of your exchanges and gain in productivity.
1️. Reply in the thread
In order to make reading the channels clearer, it is important to reply in the thread rather than posting a new message.
- To avoid " flooding ", i.e. inundating the channel with messages. This will bring more visibility and facilitate searches.
- To avoid spamming 😎
This is a good example to follow!
2️. Skipping lines rather than publishing multiple messages
We put it in second position but between us... this point will also have its place in the top 1.
Use the line break(SHIFT + ENTER) to :
- Enable employees to create a Thead
- Avoid spamming (again 😎). Some people will recognize themselves here.
3️. Avoid @channel, @here, @chaine, @all as much as possible
Reserve these mentions/tags for :
- Announcements that concern all members of the chain
- Getting feedback from chain members
- Objective urgent information - in the strict sense of the word please.
We recommend that you create teams in Slack. This will allow you to notify a certain group of people.
4️. Create of public channels
Public channels bring more flexibility in our communication for the following reasons:
- Possibility of entering/leaving without notifying an employee
- Possibility to create automation rules (e.g. notification system) → Not possible for private channels.
🙂 Of course, it is preferable to keep some channels private for privacy reasons (Admin/Finance, Teams, Founders...).
5. Set your notifications
Our attention span is precious. Keep your notifications to a minimum to preserve it.
Two ways
1. Via the parameters directly
2. Activate the "Mute" mode in your " focus " moments to stay focused until the end.
6. Google it first
Important rule in everyone's life: " Google it!
It is important to make the reflex to look for yourself before asking your N+1 (or the person first concerned).
A short guide to questions to ask yourself:
- Is the information already present in Notion (or in your internal knowledge base?)
- Can I access information easily through Google?
- Can I access information relatively easily and quickly with a little searching?
- If not → Don't be afraid to ask your pleasant colleagues 🤓
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