What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
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We didn't have it too long before I left that company, so I'm not sure how it turned out, but it was pretty excellent for discussing things.
Sometimes I wish we had that again.
Personally, the idea that anyone is arbitrarily welcome to interrupt your chosen way to work is silly.
We ask people not to use private chat (with varying degrees of success) but instead ask in channel, even if it's to a specific person:
1. It helps others reading the channel learn
2. If someone else is around and knows the answer, they can provide it
You sometimes have to reply in channel (and copy+paste the question) to get this point across, but it generally seems to work well.
If they have to physically stand up to bother you, I think that also makes them more likely to answer the question for themselves without bothering you at all.
Some people ... when they have chat, their bar for interrupting you is so low. I have a coworker who it almost seems like he'll interrupt me every time he sees an error message or exception on his screen.
Personally, I hate all "chat" channels. My attitude is that you can show up in person, or send an SMS...if it's that important. I get that doesn't align with the new global order and all, but it doesn't change my reaction.
So you get the worst of both worlds. Intrusive messaging and disjointed and irritating email.
I work with a lot of different companies. They almost universally have Slack instances that get used for discussion. One time I was working with a client who was too tight to actually pay for their Slack instance so it had amnesia.
For a while I was really grouchy about it. Then one day I was thinking along the lines of "Ah this is such a PITA. I've just had this good discussion about these requirements in Slack but because it's not a paid instance it'll vanish in a few days. Grr I'll have to take this information and put it somewhere else. I guess I'll stick it in a design document in the project's wiki. This is such an inconven... wait. Huh. That's vastly better than leaving it floating somewhere in Slack. Oh."
And in that moment, I was enlightened. Paying for Slack actually makes it a worse tool.
Like if it was just a big list of "Stuff people have starred in Slack" I would not use it.
If it was a repository of information categorised by project and subject, maybe with a little blurb of info to give me a summary of it, then under all that a link to the source material if I still needed it, that might be compelling.
So at least, for me, Skype for business has this functionality.
Personal skype stores your chat history local to the device- I found that out recently when I was looking at my non-existent conversation history on my new phone.
But the first thing I do when I install slack anywhere is turn off all the notifications (or disallow them).
Letting anyone interrupt my thinking anywhere? No thanks.
There is Yammer too, but I've never seen anyone use it.
EDIT: excuse my ignorance, I don't have much experience using these tools.
Communication tools exist along multiple axes of effort, permanence, content-bandwidth, and discoverability.
A conversation takes little effort, is high content-bandwidth (body language, tone, whiteboarding, pointing, etc), but is impossible to discover for others and is impermanent. A formal specification is more permanent, and more discoverable, but has a bit less content-bandwidth and is a high effort activity. Old school SMSs are low-effort and permanent, but not discoverable and prone to confusion because of low content-bandwidth.
Email is kinda 'middle of the tree' all round. It's primary failing for the Entperise is the point-to-point nature of discussion (removing the ability for third parties to discover it). This can be mitigated with use of appropriate groups or tools (internal mailing lists, Sharepoint-ish blobs), but that's a challenge in and of itself...
So how is Slack better than Email? It's better in the way my cheese knife is better than my bread knife. And Slack is as much a threat to email as my cheese knife is to my bread knife... They are complimentary tools that address slightly different needs on a related spectrum, and will be painful if misapplied to the wrong problems. I can cut cheese with a bread knife, I can cut bread with a cheese knife. I can make Slack my total communication system, I can pretend that email is enough ;)
Right tool for the job, don't do dumb things, and if you can't figure out how immature use of a pling-pling-pling-pling-pling chat system is gonna wreck your day-to-day work experience... ... I assume we have worked together before and you were in charge of choosing the internal communication system...
Having said that, they aren't very natural substitutes at all. In Slack etc, the natural element of dialog is a single sentence or less. In email the natural element is a paragraph or at least a couple of sentences.
In email it is normal to select who you are sending an email to, and the recipient chooses how to organize the messages. In chat it is typical in channels organized by the sender and recipients choose to join or not.
There are many other differences too.
Naturally, these days, if that's what you need why not get a proper wiki going? I do know for some MS shops the pre-paid OneNote licenses make it a tempting substitute.
Do you often use old conversations that your teammates have had to solve problems? Do you search Slack to find it? I've never been in a large Slack team and I'm curious how many people actually do that.
Also, do you end up extracting conversations into docs, or something that's easier to share with your team?
While you personally may already know this, and this doesn't solve all problems; be sure to look for and read the tiny little mostly-greyed-out link to the search syntax for Slack: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/202528808-Search-in... , in particular the "Use search modifiers" section. Slack defaults to a nearly-useless search if you don't feed it things like a channel limitation or something.
(I actually had so much of a problem with this that I built my own enterprise search tool for my Slack, Trello and GDrive, and now I'm productizing it - https://getctx.io )
Turns out one of the authors is a paid consultant who has a vested interest in pumping corporate social tools.[1]
[1] “Paul Leonardo is the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at UC Santa Barbara and consults with companies about how to use social media and other technologies more effectively.”