Bugging my colleagues with Slacks and other things that happened this week.
Those of you who have been following along know that I’m not really a fan of the way that Slack functions as an ever-present work newsfeed.
One of the biggest drawbacks in my opinion is the lack of a subject line. A subject line is like a little knock on the door with a “Yoohoo, it’s your neighbor Marty.” An indicator of the message that is to come. Slacks just fall in your inbox. There’s no pretending not to be home. There’s no mentally steeling yourself for Marty’s request. It’s dumped on your lap.
This is a Slack-first organization and it wouldn’t be possible for me to put a subject line or header in saying, “hey don’t bother looking at this for a week.” And this reared its ugly head today. I was working on a project with a colleague and I wanted her to look at something. It wasn’t urgent; I didn’t need it now. And I said this in my Slack, that it could wait until next week. But she got a notification, which can be seen as a sharp knock on your “office” door, to come quickly, jump into Slack, because for all she knows it might be important. She responded right away and clearly felt that was necessary. I know there are tools and ways to set up Slack that might mitigate this, but for most people, they aren’t using best practices.
I’m sure this has happened to many of you so here’s a blog post covering some of my best practices for effective communication.
Also, some interesting articles I’ve seen this week.
One, selfishly, is me speaking on Kyla’s awesome Leadership School podcast which you can check out here. We had great conversation about Digital Empathy, the workplace, all the good stuff.