Even in the broader context of communication at the company, many of our goals were Slack-specific: We started this project to address communication norms broadly but quickly honed in on Slack as the place where we would be able to have the most dramatic and immediate impact. If you’re just here for the guidelines, jump ahead with the links. They are shared here in almost-complete form, with a few examples redacted to protect our employees’ privacy.īut first, a bit about how we arrived at these guidelines, and some things you may want to consider that aren’t in the guidelines themselves. Now that we are all working from home, our online communication is absolutely critical-I can’t imagine how much slower we would move without structure in our communication. We released them to the company in January and they had a profound impact on our communication, even before we were all sheltered in place. So I led a committee to make some guidelines for how we use Slack. Hearing my long-held sentiment echoed across the company pushed me to action.

It was difficult to follow conversations, and many complained that they spent too much of their days just clearing notifications. But as we crossed the 100-employee mark, Slack started to feel noisy and slow.

It was a nice place to send all our alerts, and facilitate open conversation and collaboration-two things that matter a lot, and that email does poorly. Until last year, I found Slack frustrating, but tolerable.

What to use slack for