Last Updated on March 30, 2018 by Neil Murray
Over the past few months, I have been working with a small (10 total with 4 developers) remote team. I noticed some comments creeping up on Slack that were along the lines of:
I'm exiting and logging out of Slack now so I can get some work done.
Then, the other day, the CEO (he is also a developer) was at his breaking point. He said:
Seriously, slack is a pathetic medium to get work done. Its equal to being on WhatsApp all day.
Slack is, arguably, the most popular tool used from small to large-sized companies for cross-team communication. What has been going wrong with our Slack team?
Slack Problems:
- Constantly being buzzed on my desktop and mobile device.
- Always seeing a notification that pulls my attention, distracting me.
- High priority questions getting lost in the noise.
- Lower priority discussions taking up time with responding.
- Long discussions with massive threads are hard to navigate.
As a team, we haven't yet come to a decisive answer on how to handle the above problems. However, I believe that each team is different in their communication style and we will need to adjust as CF7 Skins grows.
Communication is changing
The difficulty of remote, cross-team communication extends beyond process and available tools. It taps in directly to our cognitive evolution as a species.
Although most interactions are still offline, conversation and reading have essentially become more complex by going online or digital. We are suddenly immersed in new types of cognition during conversations where time and space seem to fold, or at least slightly bend. These new types of relational cognition add much to our lives.
Clifton Evans | Posted on March 20, 2018
http://boxesandarrows.com/changing-minds/
The feelings of distraction and lack of focus are possibly a direct result of our brain adapting to new forms of communication.
Is Slack the answer for CF7 Skins communication?
As a fully remote team, how we will we know what is being worked on, if you are out for the day (or week), and how will you help other teammates who might be stuck on a problem that you have the solution for. How will we convey customer issues and discuss potential solutions? Where will we document and record this information? How will we share our knowledge with each other across teams so that we can build better, design better, and become more well-rounded in our field?
I encourage everyone to think about the above questions as you are working and speaking with other teammates. I don't have the answer or solution to a future problem, however, we can begin to imagine what could work for us. We all benefit from shared information and open communication so let's keep it that way… while not getting distracted.
RE: 3. High priority questions getting lost in the noise.
Slack should generally not be the key point of communication for high priority questions in my opinion.
I think it can be very useful as an additional method of communication, that all interested team members can see, but the main communication should general occur on the relevant Bitbucket Issue or Pivotal Tracker Story, where it provides a permanent record of the work done.
So, in other teams, Slack was great for high priority questions or issues that needed immediate attention. It was a way to ‘ping’ everyone available immediately so we could jump on the problem/issue/question right away since we would all be notified. Especially if a manager or lead dev was away. Based on the response to the question, a customer could be replied to right away, and then a project management tool (like bitbucket and pivotal) updated with a task to fix the issue or task how to share that knowledge internally (internal blog for example).
How would you propose to bring up something high priority, such as an issue with processing payments?
The examples you give all sound like support issues which we could deal with using our normal processes. An issue on processing payments is still just an issue that needs to be dealt with.
I really dislike the idea of using Slack as a flashing red light to alert the team to a particular problem. It sounds like a crisis management approach which I think is best avoided. I definitely don’t want support people flagging a particular customer issue as an emergency by using Slack.
We should stick to our normal processes for all issues – even those that might need more urgent attention.
How do you see Slack being effective for communication with a larger CF7 Skins team? Or, what were your thoughts/expectations when setting it up?