Slack is our ✨ virtual office ✨ and we expect everyone to follow a few simple guidelines to keep us all working effectively across our core means of communication and collaboration.
<aside> 💡 A reminder that intent isn't always clear on Slack – prefixing comments could prove super valuable when working across cultures, async, and via written comms like we do every day. This article includes some great tips
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<aside> 🤓 We have a logic to how we name our Slack channels ⬇️
How We Organise Our Slack Channels
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Your status on Slack is an important communication tool. It allows you to share your availability, in addition to being active or away (i.e. online or offline). You can add an emoji and a note (and Slack saves your recent status', making it easy for you to re-use them). You can also pause notifications — helpful for deep-work, when notifications can kill your flow.
Slack can be overwhelming — countless channels, multiple DMs..! But you can make Slack work better for you and set reminders to return to messages. Hover over a message, click the more actions button, and ask Slack to 'remind me about this'. These messages will then make their way into your Slackbot, your very own helper, and you can respond when you're ready.
It's your own responsibility to make sure you stay on top of messages and respond within 24 hours (remembering that we work across timezones and our expectations shouldn't be aligned to our own schedule).
Private channels or DMs should only be used when the message is a private or sensitive matter. You should default to open team and company-wide channels as much as possible. This allows others to stay in sync and input if necessary. The more transparency the better.
Replying in a thread allows conversations to continue without filling up the main channel feed. It's especially useful for those who have been away from a channel for a period of time — they can come back to a channel and catch up on what matters most to them, without getting lost in a sea of back and forth.