(2021-10-20) Using Slack For Remote Teams Where We Got It Wrong

Rhys Black: Using Slack.com for remote teams: Where we got it wrong. But something happened once our team hit 100 employees: our Slack communication broke

As you bring on more and more team members, there needs to be a structured way for people to find the information that’s relevant to them rather than just sending messages on Slack.

we’ve found it important to really define a use case for Slack at Oyster:

• Short communications only: Save the long discussions for a collaborative Google doc, a Loom video, or a Zoom call.
• No big decisions: Slack isn’t a great place to be making decisions. It’s hard to keep track of the outcome for future reference
• No knowledge creation: Slack shouldn’t be a place where knowledge is stored
• No project management: It shouldn't be the primary place we’re sharing updates or discussions about active projects—that should be done using Asana or Zendesk.

What changed when we hit 100 employees

Message volume actually grows exponentially as the company grows.

our customer-facing teams were feeling the strain the most.

Post publicly as much as possible for visibility

Create “ask” channels.

Always thread responses (if only Slack had multiple levels of threading!)

Don’t type up massive messages covering multiple topics. It makes threading hard. Instead, send a separate message for different points.