How to use Slack at Tremendous

Work-related and fun chat

You can join any public channel to listen in, ask a question, or interact with a certain group.

Almost-synchronous, fast-moving information. 

Slack is the company newsfeed. It's impossible to keep up with everything shared in Slack, and you can't expect everyone to catch something you share in Slack.

In many channels, expect messages to be buried within a few hours. If you need information to last longer, document in Notion, or create an Asana ticket. You can always link to those in Slack.

Adhere to

Use public channels by default. DMs are private between two people or a small group of people. DMs should be used for private convos specifically.

Non-ephemeral task discussion

If there’s a task in Asana, a doc in Notion, a PR in Github, or a mockup in Figma, best to keep the discussion in comments in the tool provided.

High-bandwidth collaboration

If you’re stuck on something complicated, it’s going to be much faster to hop on a call with 1-2 collaborators and iron out the kinks. Async has limitations. Complex projects that would be stalled in async workflows often get moving quickly once there’s a live discussion. This is why we still have live meetings for major decisions.

Topics where sub-communication matters

Conversations that require a human element (delivering feedback, building rapport, ironing out conflict) are best done live.

Keep your Slack status updated to let your team know what you're up to and how quickly you can respond to messages.

We use a basic Slack naming convention to keep things organized. This is done through prefixes:

These are some of the important channels and their purpose:

This site says it all: https://nohello.net/en/

Avoid sending messages (”Hi”, “You there”, “can you talk”) that don't convey any information. This is particularly unhelpful in an async environment, where the person you’re pinging may be offline when the message is read.

Prefer sending a single message that contains all of the content that they need to understand.

As said on nohello.net: If you feel it's a bit brusque to simply say "Hi" and ask the question, you can still preface your message with as many pleasantries as you see fit.

Threads let you respond directly to a message in a channel, keeping the replies, images, and other files organized neatly in a single, threaded conversation. Use them by default. (New to threads? Slack’s got an explanation.)

Why?

Threads are most important in busy channels. If a channel is small and not very active, threads probably don't make a huge difference. For large, active channels, threads are an important way to stay organized.

Once you contribute to a thread, you'll be notified of any replies. You can also click "More actions" on a thread and choose "Follow thread" to be notified. Likewise, you can select "Unfollow thread" to remove notifications.

If there’s a long thread with a bunch of cross-talk, or multiple threads about the same topic in different channels… that’s a good indicator that this is worth breaking out into a separate channel.

If you need a new channel, go ahead and create it. You should:

We create channels freely, but we also archive freely to keep channel count maintainable. If chat in a channel has gone quiet for a month or two, archive away. We can always reopen the channel later.

If there’s active discussion happening in a channel, and there’s also a Slackbot posting recurring messages into that channel, the bot messages may drown out the discussion.

To solve this, use a separate Slack channel for the notifications. Correlate the channels by using the same naming scheme:

We prefer async and online collaboration approaches, but sometimes a meeting can be quite useful:

You can trigger a call with /zoom command in Slack.

You have access to basically every channel at the team. This can be overwhelming.

You are the manager of your attention. It is on you to manage the firehose of information available to you. It is not feasible for other team members to only message you at certain times, or for channels to be quieter.

Some tips on how to do this:

Consider using Asana

If you’re asking someone to perform a task, it might be better structured in Asana with a due date. A great pattern is to pair an Asana task with a nudge in Slack.

Using mentions

Slack mentions (e.g. @here, @nick) come with additional notification properties. This is useful, because many team members have notifications muted or off.

Adding context to your message

Prepend these to messages when they have specific expectations on responses.

The core principle here: there are no read receipts in Slack. So acknowledging a message is a useful way to tell the sender that it was seen and processed. You can do this in two ways:

Emoji response - acknowledges silently.

Assume the sender won’t see these unless they look at the original message.

In-thread response - notifies sender loudly.

Use in-thread responses for when you want to loudly acknowledge receipt. These will be akin to a DM. If you aren’t sure, prefer this to an emoji response, since it’s safer.

Slack provides some formatting tips to make your messages extra fancy with bold, italic, underline, pull quotes, code snippets, bullet points, etc. Learn to use these! They help get your content across efficiently to your readers.

Look at the difference between these two messages. Same content, totally different reader experience.

We don't use Slack as a place to document important information, but it is searchable. If you can't find an answer in any of our docs and you're about to ask in Slack, it's worth doing a quick search first to see if anyone else has asked the same thing.

As of now, our Slack is a permanent record of conversations. This is useful for history / search purposes. This also means that, in the case of a lawsuit, private slack conversations may end up being read out loud in a courtroom.

Be circumspect about what you write; it might eventually be read by someone else.

Credits

Thanks to Zapier (another all-remote, bootstrapped company) for the original skeleton that we built this off of.