Slack is a great tool for open-space communication, but it can become a distraction and hurt our productivity. That's why we have agreed on ****a few ground rules:
Slack status is the fastest way to know if someone is around or not. If you are working, make sure that your status is set to active. And don't forget to close slack or set your status to inactive when you stop working.
Avoid pinging people directly on Slack. Instead, write to dedicated channels and if needed @mention the person you want to talk with. Since different people can answer on public channels, response times are decreased and information is shared.
Also having conversations on public channels helps everyone to get a sense of who may be busy at any moment. If we were all in the same room, and you go to someone's desk to talk with her, the rest of us will see that you're busy talking to that person, with DMs we miss that.
Keep DMs only for things that contain private information.
As Slack doesn't have a "read" feature and we are recommending to use public channels, please use reactions to let the people know that you have read the mesages that affect you.
We have decided on a convention for the reactions:
Unless it's an informal conversation on #random, try to keep your message into a single line, including any URLs or attachments. This way, when starting a new thread over the initial message, all the relevant info and context is visible.
If you need break your message into multiple lines use SHIFT + ENTER instead of ENTER (that would send the message).
If you need to add more information to an existing message, just edit it or start a new thread on it.
To keep discussions organised start a new thread to respond to relevant messages.
With Slack is really easy to loose track of the messages that you haven't read, if you navigate between channels the app will automatically mark the whole channel as read, even if you haven't read all the messages. Our goal is to find a balance between replying to every message and being productive.