How To Create A Slack Communication Guide Etiquette For Your Workplace

By
Frank Hamilton avatar
on December 15#best-practices
Slack etiquette

Nowadays many business companies provide the ability to work remotely on an ongoing basis for their workers from different cities, countries, and continents.

Before the worldwide quarantine, many employers had a skeptical attitude to remote cooperation as they thought remote team management was hard and practically impossible. Although, working from home during the last year has shown that there are numerous modern management tools that can track the performance of your employees anywhere. 

A great example would be outsourcing companies that are mostly related to software development - outsourcing teams build software projects for foreign clients who can easily manage the process without leaving their country. 

In this post, we would like to take a closer look at one of the most popular and frequently used communication and management tools - Slack. Custom writing reviews Writing Judge says that when working remotely, it is pivotal to dilute your work and personal life, and it relates to late-night messages as well.

So how can a business company organize Slack communication efficiently but without invading private life? Keep reading to find out the main steps companies need to take.

Set the work hours when all employees must be in touch

Along with the remote model of cooperation, many organizations offer flexible working hours to their workers to make working from home even more convenient and productive as not all people are productive from the early morning.

However, there are obvious online meetings and chats that cannot be missed even due to the flexible schedule. Writing service reviews Best Writers Online claims that business owners can create and implement a specific policy of flexible working hours including the required hours where all employees should be accessible. Although, it shouldn’t relate to weekends and vacations as these days are officially off.

The employees have to understand their own responsibility that other workers and their work partially depend on them. When the working hours are over, employees can mute the notifications for a certain period of time and read the messages in their free time.

Different chats for different purposes

Slack gives you the ability to create as many chats as you need within your organization. They are usually divided into different departments like sales, marketing, developers, managers, and so on.

You can also create general chats for the whole company to announce news and changes in the company processes. Additionally, you can create private chats but this option is available only for supervisors chosen by the chief officers.

Workers cannot find these closed chats in the general search tab as they need to be added there to have access to its messages and other files. 

Integration with other business management tools

Slack can be integrated with numerous other business applications used for the managing of internal processes and task execution within your company.

First and foremost is Google Calendar. It helps eliminate missing vital online meetings with other departments, clients, and so on. Slack alerts you about the upcoming meeting in half an hour and in a minute before the meeting starts.

Slack can be integrated to task management apps like Workast to help teams create and manage responsibilities directly from a Slack channel. This will help teams to know exactly what work is being done, and the deadline.

The communication tool can also be connected with other management tools like Jira, Confluence, Google Drive that access to needed business data is easy and quick for all employees and shared between different departments. Moreover, Slack can be integrated with various tracking tools to check the time when the user starts and ends the working day and is available. 

Due to the Motley Fool, 4,000 apps have been developed for use with Slack.

Message threads shorten the conversation - use them more often

Users can start a thread under each of the sent messages via Slack. This option helps to hold the conversation as long as you need without disturbing other users in the particular chat. It means that users should not read a long text to dive into the topic and see its details. 

Use mentions in the channels 

Each user within your workplace has its name - it can be real names, nicknames, numbers, or whatever. When you are going to send a message in a general chat, you need to mention via @ and the user names the person or the department you are turning to make it clear for others within the chat. If you need to alert the entire channel, you just have to type @ and here or @ and channel. 

Pin the most important messages

Slack provides the features of saving the most vital messages and documents inside a particular channel. Thus, all users can quickly and easily find the required messages.

Slack also has a search tab where you can type a word related to the message you are looking for but it will be a bit long as you need to remember what channel it was posted in, who posted it, and when exactly.  

Private messaging is not advisable 

The trust and reliability of your employees depend on the level of transparency of the company process and communication. Private messages are for discussion of private information only like career promotion, salary and work performance review, and so on.

All other information is recommended to be shared in the department and general channels so that each worker could know about the company updates, be aware of all changes and not feel neglected as well.

All users should add a description of their position in the company

This option is required mostly for new employees. If we talk about the remote type of cooperation, most workers have never seen each other in real life. So the descriptions of job positions make the search for the needed specialists quicker and precise. The text should not be long,  it is enough to type several words like project manager, content manager, chief technical officer, etc. 

Bottom line

Slack is a very convenient and easy-to-use communication tool that not only provides remote collaboration between all companies’ departments but also manages the employees working hours and tracks the performance of their work. Thanks to the management tools like Slack, online communication can be even more productive and transparent than offline. 

This article is a guest blog written by Frank Hamilton. To contribute a guest post to Workast.com, please complete the expression of interest form here.

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