Face to face conversations in the Slack era

You and your coworkers have mouths and faces. Use them from time to time.

In a short period of time we’ve gone from face to face conversations to memos, to emails, to Gmail chat, to Hipchat, and now to Slack. Slack isn’t particularly innovative, it’s just very well designed and very easy to use, and it’s a great business tool for a whole company to be in sync. However, it can also slow down a team if used incorrectly.

Slack is a chat application and it’s ephemeral in nature. They’ve tried to solve this by making search features work better and by having threads, but the fact still stands: something you post on Slack has a lifespan and that lifespan has hours, if not minutes. Then, it gets lost into eternity. Referring back to it is hard, if not impossible, and you can’t expect everyone in the team to have the same detective searching abilities as you do.

Simply don’t brainstorm on Slack. Brainstorming needs a face to face conversation, a good old whiteboard, and somewhere clear and persisted where you write down key takeaways and conclusions. People are sometimes not good at writing and that leaves quality feedback and opinions out of the table. Brainstorming on Slack leads to poorly documented company decisions, leaving team members out of the loop and not in sync. People forget about these decisions (because they’re lost somewhere up in the ether of Slack messages) and that’s frustrating, with a lot of back and forth and miscommunication.

Slack works great for short conversations, quickly scheduling meetings, coffee runs, lunch trains, checking if someone is available, and other spontaneous endeavors. Long Slack conversations are inefficient, unproductive, and asynchronous. Multitasking doesn’t help either: the longer the conversation, the more time people spend on other things while they’re chatting, which reduces the quality of both work and chat.

People have a hard time conveying their written thoughts, too, especially in long, convoluted conversations. Add that to more than one or two people chiming in and you have a real chaos in your hands.

There’s a reason why our faces are so expressive. We use our face muscles to convey emotions, and we use our eyes to gauge the meaning behind people’s words. A person’s tone can appear overly dramatic, passive-aggressive, or rude on chat, when the true nature of their words is just simple and relaxed.

Keep difficult conversation face to face. They’re called difficult for a reason but are sometimes necessary. You’ll save on frustration and miscommunication.

After-hours Slack is an anxiety ticking time bomb. The fact that Slack is so spontaneous and ephemeral creates this unhealthy expectation that messages are to be responded immediately. People know you’ve seen the notification, you know they know you’ve seen the notification, and this unintended passive aggressive cycle of doom begins.

If it can wait until Monday, then wait until Monday. Very few things can be communicated in Slack that dramatically affect a company’s operations during the weekend or at 11pm. Unhealthy expectations create bad company culture, and not giving your coworkers a rest enforces a toxic culture.

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Last but not least, don’t let Slack control your company culture. Slack is a tool and must stay as such. Make your company culture about real values, real conversations, and real events.

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