A Guide to Effective Slack

With more and more companies moving to a remote-first or hybrid model, having an easy way to share and find information in efficient ways is more important than ever. The following post covers different categories of channels that I've seen in different companies and the benefits of each them.

Company Announcements

Every company should have a general announcements channel that makes it easier for everyone to stay informed about things that impact everyone. This could be things like new policies, welcoming new folks, open enrollment dates, etc.

General Engineering

This is a great central place for folks to share new tools, interesting articles, vulnerabilities, pose open questions, show and tell, request licenses for third party tools, etc.

Projects

I've always liked the idea of spinning up channels that help capture anything and everything around a particular project. This can make it a lot easier to collaborate, share documentation, troubleshoot, discuss deadlines, launch plans, bugs, etc.

Teams

These are great ways to get more eyes on questions for specific teams. This might include questions around services, processes, triaging of potential bugs, etc. One of the benefits of these kinds of channels is that more folks can respond to questions instead of privately messaging single individuals which could result in more timely responses.

Services

These kinds of channels may not be necessary if team-specific channels cover the bases here, but it can be a great way to surface information about upcoming maintenance windows, deployments, release notes, finding documentation, etc.

Offices

If your company is operating multiple offices, it's important to have a way to ask about access, parking, policies, etc. These create good opportunities for building community and could also be a great way to share information around visiting, upcoming closures, local events, etc.

Customer Support

This is an off-shoot of the Teams channels section, but I wanted to highlight the benefits of this one specifically. It's always valuable to have a direct line to your customer support team. This helps support better relationships with the folks that have a direct line to your customers. It's a great forum for proactively communicating with them regarding rolling out new features, sharing release notes, discussing potential issues and workarounds, timelines for fixes, etc.

Community

Building internal communities within companies is important to the overall sense of connectedness you feel to your work and your coworkers. Creating separate channels on particular topics is a great way to do this. It will give folks a place to ask high-level questions, work together to find solutions to more ambigious issues, have deeper conversations, etc. It also can give you an opportunity with to work with people that you may not work with day-to-day.

Incidents

For times when things may not be working well and you need a forum for raising issues, it's great to have a central place for doing so. With a central incidents channel, it makes it easier for folks to better inform themselves of current issues, swarm on triaging issues, and have a place to kick off deeper dives. Once an incident is triaged and considered big enough to require more conversation and follow up, it's good to spawn separate incident-specific channels to avoid making the central channel too noisy.

Tool-Specific Help

Odds are that you and your colleagues are using a lot of the same software daily. By having central channels to discuss those tools, it makes it easier to discuss different features, outages, upgrades, upcoming maintenance windows, how to acquire licenses, etc.