edit, I'll be more helpful with criticism. I feel like Teams is well integrated into their cloud stuff on the good side. The cons are it very much feels like it is aimed at checking some CIO and HR requirements around control and auditability. Spontaneity and usefulness suffer.
This article would've been better with some concrete examples, or a study, or really anything to back it out. "Slack can be used for bad things". Well, so can email, mailing lists, support forums, internal chat systems (jabber), etc.
Not even one example, just "A lot of my CEO and founder friends talk about this".
As with any tool, it's how you use it. Best implementations I have seen of Slack is when the rules are clear for the beginning. Maybe channels are meant to be public and private is an exception, or the opposite (everything private to avoid noise). And clear guidelines. And to be fair, the discussion is usually a reflection of the company culture that is already present: formal, informal, direct. The tool just facilitates it.
Exactly. “High-school type problems” are created by immature people, not the tool. That kind of behavior would never be tolerated at any of the companies I’ve worked at, no matter what the medium.
Tech companies, and startups in particular, tend to have these problems because their culture and leadership is sophomoric and immature, and those people hire and promote (or fail to fire) similar people.
If a CEO thinks this is a problem in their company, then they need to, well, be a CEO and do something about it. Leadership sets the tone. Lack
of leadership creates a void.
Exactly I've worked at places like this and the cadence is usually set by the people in leadership. If the boss up top is a drunk and boning every 20 year old ( been at one such place ), it sets the tone for everyone else. Also does not help if everyone in the team is young and DTF.
1. Just fire the shitty people. I don't know why companies don't do this more in the US - it's at-will, just fire them.
2. Why are you trying to stop your employees from organizing????
> “The onus is on the CEO,” Flory said. “Our focus has been on the values,”
Agreed on this last statement. Ultimately if Slack is becoming a toxic environment there are obviously other issues - employees being able to quickly communicate and organize is not one of them.
This post matches up with every other "We're ditching Slack" post I've seen. It comes down to:
1. Our employees can't behave themselves
2. Our managers can't or won't do anything about it
3. Executives aren't willing to draw a line in the sand
4. I guess Slack is terrible?
If a tool is so easily subverted and misused so widely, eventually it’s the tool’s fault. Arguing that it’s just the users’ fault is like trying to boil the ocean. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or not, the component that can actually be addressed is the tool, so the tool is capable of bearing blame.
We’ve found the same behavior in normal person to person speech, so we’ve implemented a gag policy that nobody talks to one another during business hours. Ultimately, it’s person to person communication that we’ve found is the broken tool for, granted, a minority of users so we’ve implemented this policy company wide.
Your satire rings very flat because it doesn’t happen much in person to person communication. The whole reason it’s noteworthy to talk about it in regards to Slack is that it does happen to a much greater extent in Slack and other chat programs than in almost any other corporate communication system, enough to make it clear that instant messaging, not people, is the core of the issue.
My experience is the exact opposite. All personnel problems have occurred in-person, often at company events. I find that employees are generally much more considerate and careful about what they say over slack as everything basically becomes permanent record.
> Your satire rings very flat because it doesn’t happen much in person to person communication.
Of course it does. It is just harder to audit and record. That's why they call it "high school like" behavior - you put a bunch of people in a room together every day and you get gossip.
I think this is wrong. The property of high school that led to this being named that way is that high school facilitates immature, consequence-free social contexts where asserting individuality is key to your social status among peers.
In-person workplaces do not foster this usually, with some exceptions in immature start-ups or bro-y Wall Street.
By contrast, it’s exactly the kind of atmosphere that instant messaging environments foster.
> 1. Just fire the shitty people. I don't know why companies don't do this more in the US - it's at-will, just fire them.
I've asked this question of managers many times. The answer is usually some variation on "The shitty ones are the ones who know how to work the system to their advantage the best. They're the most likely to sue for wrongful termination and otherwise make my life hell if I fire them."
The best thing to do is to closely and carefully document their inappropriate behavior.
Anybody can do this, not just HR. If you have overwhelming evidence of job misconduct and provide it to your company, it gives them ammunition to defend themselves against those sorts of legal recourses.
I would have a serious performance conversation with the manager and explain to them that their job as a manager is to take important but sometimes difficult decisions. If they can't bring themselves to do this, they shouldn't be a manager.
The outcome you want is the shittiness to stop and you have an objective transcript of everything that happened in slack, so assuming the shittiness is real this isn't even remotely hard.
Option 1: If the behaviour isn't that bad or is in some sense borderline or open to interpretation, you speak to them in person, say the thing that happened that needs to stop, state clearly why it isn't in line with your values, is damaging to the team/whatever the problem is, and state your expectation that it will stop and if it doesn't immediately stop it will affect their future with the firm. You follow up with an email recapping all of the conversation (in particular the statement that if it happens again they're out) and copy HR. You need to do option 1 if you have been allowing this behaviour to slide in the past. It's important to do this with all parties who have been indulging in this behaviour and don't show any kind of favouritism.
Option 2: If it's not the first time (ie you've already done some version of option 1 and it hasn't stopped) or the behaviour is really egregious you book a 1:1 with the person and when they show up HR is there with you. You show them the thing on slack that is happening that isn't ok and any previous "option 1" recap emails. You ask them to explain any extenuating circumstances. You terminate them there and then unless they have a really compelling story. You send an email to the HR person thanking them for handling the situation (especially since the reason you got here is that you have made mistakes as a manager), summarising the conversation and your thought process that meant option 1 was not appropriate. If they've done this before you have the email track from when you did option 1 before to add to their evidence trail.
For at-will employees there's no way any kind of wrongful termination will stick if you follow this kind of fair and rigorous process, you document conversations you have had and your rationale for dismissal is reasonable. For employees in a European or UK employment context, you need to be more aware of the surrounding context and make sure they have actually breached your policies and then follow your disciplinary process appropriately. If you work with your HR colleagues this isn't hard.
[edit] There is also an "Option 0" above which is less heavy-handed. Part of being a good manager is knowing when to take the person out for a coffee, put a hand on their shoulder and just give them the "Come on you know this isn't ok" conversation. Then you follow up with an email (but don't copy HR) and make sure you save it in case you need to escalate further. Just make sure you don't option 0 your buddies and escalate everyone else because that is seriously bad.
I manage a team where we have had one member frequently get into issues with Slack. Mostly in the form of drawing into political discussions or lengthy drama, usually not inappropriate by tone or comment, but mostly by relentlessness and distraction.
His quality of work output is very high, his teammates rate him highly in reviews, he is kind & respectful in all other forms of communication like code reviews, team meetings, etc. It’s just 100% the instant gratification of a real time chat response in a debate thread that draws him to the problem zone.
Firing someone like this would be ridiculous. It would hurt team morale, lower productivity, sink costs into finding and training a backfill, and establish that we, as managers, would prefer to kick people and bark orders under the threat of dismissal than to be accepting of flaws and actually do the job of managing and help the person grow past this.
Nah, I think you’re wrong. It would require a very revisionist / mental gymnastics interpretations of your original post and it just doesn’t seem reasonable given all your other follow up comments.
You said “just fire the shitty people” in response to a very low stakes topic like misbehavior on a chat program, and then vigorously added response comments all over defending the claim that any type of community gathering of coworkers begets this shitty behavior.
The most reasonable take possible on your initial comment is that you are suggesting a very extreme low bar for firing people rather than helping them improve.
Point 1 can sound harsh at times, but when you consider the consequences of a toxic team member being left to interact with the rest of the organization every day, it becomes clear that there is a bigger problem at play.
You do not want your good employees to suffer at the hands of a bad employee. It might be difficult to do the right thing in these cases. I would try to focus on the people/products/customers you are helping and less on the negativity you are removing.
I have personally witnessed the consequences of toxicity spreading throughout a team. It is incredible how much productivity you lose and how much more stress you have in your life when everyone is salty all the time.
If decreasing the friction to communicate is causing problems in your company, then maybe you don’t have a tooling problem or a communication problem, but a culture problem.
Bingo. Having a user tied to an actual person, and not just a dog with an internet connection and email address must make it orders of magnitude simpler to address offenders.
Isn't this kind of orthogonal to the software you choose to use? Those issues are a factor of public vs. private Slacks or email lists. Internal email isn't just dogs with internet connections, and big public Slack servers may just be 3 people with hundreds of alts and bots for all you know. (Hyperbolizing, but you get the idea.)
A lot of my CEO and founder friends talk about this"... rephrased: "My CEO and founder friends are upset that their employees use a piece of software to talk about the toxic culture my CEO and founder friends have cultivated"
This reflects my experience. The people I work with now use slack exclusively for work and the odd share of more personal items while on vacation/weekend/walk during lunch. We have similar interests so the content is always welcomed. Any important discussion happens offline or on the phone, though. I can’t imagine us using slack for anything outside of trivial, asynchronous messages and events reported by bots.
At most other companies I’ve had people message me about salary concerns, unionization, anger towards a manager or CEO, endless banter about anything but work, etc. The main difference was that these places were run by people who really didn’t care about their employees and slack ended up a reflection of that. A lot of upset, frustrated, resentful venting in private channels.
If slack didn’t exist, these conversations would have happened some other way. There’s no way everyone could keep sane in a bad work environment without some degree of venting or comradeship.
Agreed. Having been/being a person(s) managers and IC, company culture comes from the head honcho of any subgroup. If the head honcho ignores bad behavior or doesn't tend to it, it's their fault.
Having slack expose those faults in the management chain doesn't mean this is an employee/IC problem. These managers of the company should learn how to manage people better for $$$ they're (we're) getting paid for.
There is really no strong argument made in this article. It seems like most, if not all, of the problems they talk about are _employee_ problems not slack problems. Slack is simply a medium to chat with your company and team, one which is pretty easy to use desipite its flaws. Employees being toxic is just that, it's not because of slack.
As others have mentioned, this is a professional communication tool there is no need for fully private conversations. Chats should always be accesible by HR/admins.
I was thinking the article would be about the deteriorating quality of Slack and the lack of improvement in their facilitation of perusing channels.
The article was instead that CEOs don’t want to get talked about behind their back and so are going to shut it down. While Slack might increase the ease of that, it’s not like employees couldn’t do it via email or at the water cooler instead. This speaks to leadership problems more than anything else.
My coworker wrote a bot for Slack that spams most of our channels with random gifs throughout the day. Most of my other coworkers find it amusing, but to me, it's quite distracting. I opened an issue with Slack to ask them to add an "ignore" feature, but they responded that ignoring anyone is counterproductive so they won't be adding it. Thanks, Slack.
Just close the app then, right? Does your job obligate you to be on Slack all the time, probably not. You get more time back, and deliver more value to your company's business.
Many jobs do require Slack open all the time. At my job that's the entire point, if it can wait send an email, if it needs attention now, slack. People get upset if you don't respond within 5 minutes, even if it's just to say I'll get back to you.
Not in my experience. I never bothered enabling notifications from Slack. I can only tell if I received a message if I actually see the red mark on the pinned tab's favicon. Sometimes I don't get back to people for 10 to 15 minutes and they've never complained about it.
Okay, back to the people who need Slack open for their jobs.
Not being able to mute or suppress doesn't necessarily need HR if everybody thinks it's quirky and harmless fun. You're then the odd man out and ostracized for trying to do your job efficiently - it's pretty bogus, but until some HN user decides to create a new messaging channel. It's gotten to the point where people will avoid seeing you in person but just as quickly ask if you "got that slack" the second they do. It's like e-mail but now you're expected to have it on your phone, home computer, work computer - never a chance to say "no" because you didn't feel like reading it at the time even as it's 9 pm on a Monday night. It's invasive and turns work banter into privatized logs of discussion - from an entry level POV this is terrible.
> Okay, back to the people who need Slack open for their jobs.
It's a requirement at my job, but no one is required to respond right away. Just in a reasonable time frame. Sometimes I have to wait 15 to 30 minutes before I get a response to a message and it's similar to how long people may wait for me to respond to them.
> It's gotten to the point where people will avoid seeing you in person but just as quickly ask if you "got that slack"
Before we had to start working from home, people would typically come to my desk to talk if they wanted me to look at something. If it was someone from another office, the same time frame as I described earlier for replying to a message was perfectly fine and no one complained about it. We've been using Slack for 2 years at my workplace.
> It's like e-mail but now you're expected to have it on your phone, home computer, work computer
I actually use an older smartphone that won't work with Slack (Nokia N9). It used to work when Slack had an IRC gateway, but not now. I also tell my employer that I refuse to install any work related software on my personal devices and they're fine with that. If it was that important, then they can provide me with company issued devices. So far, they haven't bothered.
As for notifications, it's up to you if you want to enable them and it applies to any type of chat client, not just Slack. I prefer just checking it periodically during work hours and any messages that I receive, I'll reply when I check for them. What you describe is a problem at the business level as opposed to a specific chat client.
For me, I would rather use a less resource intensive IM framework like IRC over Slack, mainly because it's a resource hog and frequently has significant UI lag when running it in a Firefox tab (to the point where I have to wait 3 to 5 seconds for text I type to show up on the screen).
If you are having trouble with distracting conversation or bots, but are expected to work in the channel, I would consider it the same as any in-person distraction. Loud music, nerf guns, shouting or laughing in an open office. You could politely ask them to turn it off.
Or you could mute notifications except for @mentions and @all and tell them to use that if they need you.
Frustrating, but I agree with Slack here. It isn't their job to police the behavior of your coworkers. Maybe try talking to the person directly? Or their boss? Or HR?
Blocking people within your own company is just adding dysfunction to the company. If it gets to that point where someone is justifiably blocked by someone else (harassment, etc) HR should get involved and someone should be fired.
They don't need to police anyone. It would be you deciding who/what you choose to mute. They give you the ability to mute channels, but not to mute bots. It should be something they could add.
My company's approach is just that bot posts go in their own dedicated channels that anyone can mute or watch as they see fit. That works ok for us. But it doesn't give someone that option in a company that allows bot posts in any channel.
I'm pretty sure you can mute bots, since they are just like any other user (right click on bot DM -> mute conversation). Or you can mute/leave the channel itself. You can also hide images/GIFs posted in channels by default.
If they give me the option to mute someone (or in this case, something), that's not Slack policing anything. It's simply them enabling me to mute distractions. As I mentioned too, most of the others see no problem with the bot. They actually enjoy it. So muting it for myself would be preferable.
If Slack allowed me to ignore others, then I would be accountable for missing any important messages. I am okay with having that responsibility.
wrote a bot for Slack that spams most of our channels with random gifs throughout the day
I am surprised that sort of behaviour is even allowed. The places I've worked would've probably given such an employee a very strong reprimand. Then again, they've also had clear policies about not... slacking off with the company's resources.
I've got a good eye for UX and have sent several improvements / feature adds via the /feedback mechanism. (I was one of the earliest complainers about the WYSIWYG fiasco, for ex.) For everything I've suggested they have some inane response tantamount to "that would allow users to do something that we decided no one should need to do." Their Product Engineers are shamefully obtuse is the vibe I get.
Have you talked to the person who made the not? They might not realize how distracting it is. Maybe they'll move it to another channel as a compromise.
Really though, having the ability to ignore _bots_ would be quite useful, a lot of noise comes from bots that might be useful to some of my coworkers, but not others, even in the same channel.
And also ignoring highlights from particular people too
Yes. It's only a matter of time before there is a backlash to Slack.
I won't understand the backlash when it comes, just as I didn't understand the excitement. Slack is just a chat client. Chat has been around forever. Corporate chat clients have been around forever. What am I missing?
Yeah, from 2005-2009 I had a boss who insisted all staff be on AOL IM, with groups etc. There was an option to automatically save all chats. Slack has more features, but I don't see it as fundamentally different.
Honestly it's just the little details... which are huge. For better or worse emoji reactions and gifs really change the tenor of conversations. You can say its just chat, and that's true, but people are complicated and the smallest of chat features changes interactions so much.
Just as an example, "heres a new feature" vs "heres a new feature (+100 thumbs up emoji)", for better or worse that changes people.
I get what you're trying to say, but ... I still don't see it. I introduced slack at work a few years ago. It's fine, it's modern and has nice UI (UX on the other hand ... is just OK). I also used chat clients and IRC since the 90s. I don't see slack being the Michael Jordan of Chat clients. I don't see how it is a fundamental change the way the iPhone was.
Agreed. Curious to hear if you think it's side effect of a more corporate-looking UI? Or is it the association with Microsoft and other "office products"?
I think there's something there but I don't think I'd describe it as high school culture. It's more that things are way more permanent/visible. A one off watercooler comment from someone having a bad day is suddenly A THING. Sometimes people need to vent and commune without it going on their permanent record.
I personally find myself doing the opposite and censoring myself on slack, because I know a comment that's funny in context might read terribly a year removed.
This sounds a lot more like your company culture is the issue than the tool. If you think this sort of thing didn't happen via emails, or even in the office kitchen, you're naive. If you're more interested in broad strokes like banning a tool than addressing acute bad behaviour, you shouldn't be managing people.
Oh, they are doing "unprofessional" things in a tool that facilitates informal communication now, are they?
Well. It's called chatter. That will either happen over the watercooler, or it will happen over text. The only problem is that off the cuff remarks can be part of the permanent record now. But otherwise, they should be harmless.
And also... maybe go fix the problems people are "bearish" about? (also what's this stock market lingo doing here)
> The problematic employee, the employee who would sit around at the lunchroom and tell people how bad this place is
Well, maybe the place IS bad. And if they are bitching about it, they may still care – employees who have "checked out" won't complain nearly as much (or at all), while looking elsewhere. Or maybe they are just venting and had a bad week. Or it's a cry for help. If the place weren't as bad, other employees could help the person.
> and it’s amplifying.
Oh, so other people agree with the person too? Maybe there is a problem indeed.
I don’t disagree with some of your other points, but having problems and being inclined to complain about them are often separate things.
Like at startups, there are often a ton of problems, naturally. At some startups people complain a lot. At some they’re good at fixing or ignoring problem for some greater goal. Aiming for the latter (I.e not amplifying) should be a goal as well while you reduce your problems.
> The only problem is that off the cuff remarks can be part of the permanent record now.
I don't think you appreciate the scale of how many headaches this can create for a large company. Previously, A says something mean about B at the watercooler, even if somebody overhears it's all he says, she says. With Slack (or any other group chat/IM system), if A says the same thing, it's broadcast to everybody else on the channel and anybody can take out of context screenshots and run squealing to HR/EEOC/lawyers/whoever. And it's all accessible to anybody with a subpoena on a fishing expedition as well.
And you can't just fix the company or the people: beyond a certain scale, no matter how good your hiring process and training, no matter how awesome your company culture and benefits, you'll get permanently unhappy people, shit-stirring trolls, wackos with extreme views and all the other weird creatures that populate any Internet forum. So eventually you have to converge on reserving chat only for strictly work-related comms and training people to take anything with the mildest whiff of controversy to talking in person/over video.
Slack has no priority levels. Slack pings you: is it an alert, a question, an outage, or someone sending you a funny gif? You can’t adjust the relative priority of these alerts, so good luck!
I’ve also seen that it regularly replaces documentation for teams. This is an issue, since slack just scrolls forever. You might have memorized the precise sentence to search for (I’ve done this), but good luck to everyone else.
All in all I think more companies would be better off with just IRC for ephemeral chats. IRC sets no expectation that you’ll catch up with everything that happened when you were offline, which in this case is good.
Yes! The Noise Machine aspects, the sprawling dumpster that is threads, and the fact that there's no way for all 7 people DMing me at once to see that there are 7 of them DMing me at once make the platform an indispensable nightmare.
I'm starting to notice that organizations with long term remote experience like Basecamp and Automatic rely a lot more on longer, async communication over instant messaging. There might be something to that.
Doesn't the Threads view (Ctrl T, Mac: Cmd T) list all threads you're involved with in chronological order, navigable by mouse or keyboard, and searchable? What's your pain point with threads?
> the fact that there's no way for all 7 people DMing me at once to see that there are 7 of them DMing me at once
This same objection applies to every other text-based communication medium out there that I'm aware of.
MS Teams has the ability to mark something as important and it isn't such a great feature IMO.
Instead, create groups for whatever purpose and use it (eg, an @<team>_devs to avoid blowing up everyone else in the channel). @mentions stand out when you're scrolling through a feed.
My experience with Slack was it is a litmus test for your company culture. If you have people prone to histrionics and complaining, it's going to encourage that. If you have cliquish attrition-game players, they're going to create their own parallel channel scheme. If you have grandstanding drama queens who work an audience, it's the weapon of choice for the sort of people who send emails with long cc' lists. If you have hustlers who pretend you owe them things and always seem to cc' your boss, they will use public channels for off hours callouts that sit for hours before you can respond.
The one anti-pattern personality that Slack does mitigate well is people who use in person meetings and phone calls to make after the fact misrepresentations, and I suppose, sales.
Yeah, I wonder what ever happened to the common-sense idea that culture flows outward from the people with the "power." Maybe it's by example, or maybe it's by unintended consequence. Maybe it's caused by some moralistic / idealistic sort of policy, or maybe it's through ignorance of the unconscious biases that people have.
To that end, Slack, being a communications enabler, merely accelerates the rate of these things happening. You can turn it off, but then you can turn off the company too. You can try to make everything out in the open open, but then you quench creativity as well as meaningful 1-1 interactions between people.
We get what we reward, and leaders who espouse one set of values but reward another in practice are necessarily going to promote a layer of jerks. It's the literal recipe for a jerk factory.
To me, if there were a backlash against Slack, it is because it makes a great scapegoat. It's different from a social media platform because social platforms have to deal with the public, where a company has every tool it needs to evolve its culture. Personally, I think Slack could be a much needed twitter-killer by letting channels and instances promote messages to being public facing, while providing much of the value twitter doesn't.
> leaders who espouse one set of values but reward another in practice are necessarily going to promote a layer of jerks
I had to read this comment a few times, because I think it's truly a wonderful insight.
This is true for many things. We should be careful as leaders to espouse and reward the same practices. We should be careful as the led to see what people actually reward and ignore what they espouse.
Yep, dead on. Slack isn't the cause, it's a symptom. I worked at a company that adopted HipChat, and then Slack, very early. There was never any of this kind of drama. People were largely professional, aside from some goofing off in team chat.
My current company is full of "histrionics and complaining". It is almost entirely (but not completely) kids who would have been too young to be in software 7 years ago. The cause of this, in my experience, is a generational culture shift that seems to have done away with the common etiquette of keeping politics and agitation away from work.
> “They create problems, high-school-type problems,” one CEO of a midsized firm told me. “People are making fun of co-workers, they’re acting unprofessionally, and it’s technically a company system.”
The crux of this is that Slack enables long, heated arguments that normally would be defused by:
1. Being surrounded by your coworkers
2. The frown of your manager
3. The strain on the faces of those around you
It basically comes down to 80s/90s era concepts of netiquette: try to imagine that the person you're writing your response to is a thinking and feeling individual, and imagine their reaction to your words. Read out your words that you've written in the heat of the moment and think hard about how they'll be felt when read.
If you have an employee who is prone to ridiculing others and won't desist from doing so when asked...
>If you have an employee who is prone to ridiculing others and won't desist from doing so when asked...
>FIRE
>THEM
Honestly, why does this have anything to do with slack. If it's not there, it will be in the break room or hallway or bathroom or wherever. That's a toxic person being enabled by technology. Not toxic technology magically transforming a person.
What it has to do with Slack and every other social media platform is that (vs. break-room trash-talk) it magnifies the harassment - it's instantly amplified, spread more broadly, and is more durable.
It also reduces the dampening influences of people's emotional responses in meatspace.
Slack may or may not be better/worse than FB, Twitter, etc. in this regard, but all can definitely magnify divisions in any group of people, from a clique to a nation.
It is just the dark side of reducing the communication friction that helps people work together better (kind of like a hammer is better than a rock for both setting nails and breaking skulls).
As a manager/owner, if your team/company has such toxic people, you're better off losing them.
I also wonder if tech ageism isn't at play here. The social rules of high-school and college are nothing like the social rules of the rest of society. In those places, a person can create a group of friends and only interact with them for the most part.
In a real job without high turnover, you have to learn to get along with everyone all the time. Startups (the ones complaining here) aren't known for having lots of older workers who've had time to polish their social skills and have the rough edges worn down (programmers generally aren't known for their amazing social skills in the first place).
I'd conjecture that moving 2-3 older devs onto each of those teams could drastically improve the group dynamics.
Absolutely - must lose the toxic people as as fast as possible! They will damage the team at a far faster rate than any possibly contribution they can make.
The one good thing in this, is that, although these social media platforms can amplify and spread the toxicity, they can also make it a lot easier to identify & document.
I've found putting people in the same room often helps. Especially when there has been an issue. Generally, just actual discussion and a firm reminder that we're all professional adults on the same team is often enough.
Recent pandemic events notwithstanding...
I'm also a bit gun shy about firing the "problem individual" since I've generally found that particular individual is often the one caught replying and not the instigator. YMMV.
Nuance and context and all that.
The "heads should roll" thing works but make sure its well targeted and for accurate cause.
Twist. We’ve been using it as a slack alternative and it truly works as a better email replacement. It’s great for announcements, and isn’t super overwhelming with every channel organized like an inbox. The UX is super simple. Haven’t played with it too much just yet, but like it so far
154 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadI'm happy with it.
edit, I'll be more helpful with criticism. I feel like Teams is well integrated into their cloud stuff on the good side. The cons are it very much feels like it is aimed at checking some CIO and HR requirements around control and auditability. Spontaneity and usefulness suffer.
Not even one example, just "A lot of my CEO and founder friends talk about this".
As with any tool, it's how you use it. Best implementations I have seen of Slack is when the rules are clear for the beginning. Maybe channels are meant to be public and private is an exception, or the opposite (everything private to avoid noise). And clear guidelines. And to be fair, the discussion is usually a reflection of the company culture that is already present: formal, informal, direct. The tool just facilitates it.
Tech companies, and startups in particular, tend to have these problems because their culture and leadership is sophomoric and immature, and those people hire and promote (or fail to fire) similar people.
If a CEO thinks this is a problem in their company, then they need to, well, be a CEO and do something about it. Leadership sets the tone. Lack of leadership creates a void.
1. Just fire the shitty people. I don't know why companies don't do this more in the US - it's at-will, just fire them.
2. Why are you trying to stop your employees from organizing????
> “The onus is on the CEO,” Flory said. “Our focus has been on the values,”
Agreed on this last statement. Ultimately if Slack is becoming a toxic environment there are obviously other issues - employees being able to quickly communicate and organize is not one of them.
1. Our employees can't behave themselves 2. Our managers can't or won't do anything about it 3. Executives aren't willing to draw a line in the sand 4. I guess Slack is terrible?
Of course it does. It is just harder to audit and record. That's why they call it "high school like" behavior - you put a bunch of people in a room together every day and you get gossip.
In-person workplaces do not foster this usually, with some exceptions in immature start-ups or bro-y Wall Street.
By contrast, it’s exactly the kind of atmosphere that instant messaging environments foster.
I've asked this question of managers many times. The answer is usually some variation on "The shitty ones are the ones who know how to work the system to their advantage the best. They're the most likely to sue for wrongful termination and otherwise make my life hell if I fire them."
Anybody can do this, not just HR. If you have overwhelming evidence of job misconduct and provide it to your company, it gives them ammunition to defend themselves against those sorts of legal recourses.
The outcome you want is the shittiness to stop and you have an objective transcript of everything that happened in slack, so assuming the shittiness is real this isn't even remotely hard.
Option 1: If the behaviour isn't that bad or is in some sense borderline or open to interpretation, you speak to them in person, say the thing that happened that needs to stop, state clearly why it isn't in line with your values, is damaging to the team/whatever the problem is, and state your expectation that it will stop and if it doesn't immediately stop it will affect their future with the firm. You follow up with an email recapping all of the conversation (in particular the statement that if it happens again they're out) and copy HR. You need to do option 1 if you have been allowing this behaviour to slide in the past. It's important to do this with all parties who have been indulging in this behaviour and don't show any kind of favouritism.
Option 2: If it's not the first time (ie you've already done some version of option 1 and it hasn't stopped) or the behaviour is really egregious you book a 1:1 with the person and when they show up HR is there with you. You show them the thing on slack that is happening that isn't ok and any previous "option 1" recap emails. You ask them to explain any extenuating circumstances. You terminate them there and then unless they have a really compelling story. You send an email to the HR person thanking them for handling the situation (especially since the reason you got here is that you have made mistakes as a manager), summarising the conversation and your thought process that meant option 1 was not appropriate. If they've done this before you have the email track from when you did option 1 before to add to their evidence trail.
For at-will employees there's no way any kind of wrongful termination will stick if you follow this kind of fair and rigorous process, you document conversations you have had and your rationale for dismissal is reasonable. For employees in a European or UK employment context, you need to be more aware of the surrounding context and make sure they have actually breached your policies and then follow your disciplinary process appropriately. If you work with your HR colleagues this isn't hard.
[edit] There is also an "Option 0" above which is less heavy-handed. Part of being a good manager is knowing when to take the person out for a coffee, put a hand on their shoulder and just give them the "Come on you know this isn't ok" conversation. Then you follow up with an email (but don't copy HR) and make sure you save it in case you need to escalate further. Just make sure you don't option 0 your buddies and escalate everyone else because that is seriously bad.
His quality of work output is very high, his teammates rate him highly in reviews, he is kind & respectful in all other forms of communication like code reviews, team meetings, etc. It’s just 100% the instant gratification of a real time chat response in a debate thread that draws him to the problem zone.
Firing someone like this would be ridiculous. It would hurt team morale, lower productivity, sink costs into finding and training a backfill, and establish that we, as managers, would prefer to kick people and bark orders under the threat of dismissal than to be accepting of flaws and actually do the job of managing and help the person grow past this.
You said “just fire the shitty people” in response to a very low stakes topic like misbehavior on a chat program, and then vigorously added response comments all over defending the claim that any type of community gathering of coworkers begets this shitty behavior.
The most reasonable take possible on your initial comment is that you are suggesting a very extreme low bar for firing people rather than helping them improve.
You do not want your good employees to suffer at the hands of a bad employee. It might be difficult to do the right thing in these cases. I would try to focus on the people/products/customers you are helping and less on the negativity you are removing.
I have personally witnessed the consequences of toxicity spreading throughout a team. It is incredible how much productivity you lose and how much more stress you have in your life when everyone is salty all the time.
If anything, Slack is much easier to moderate than e-mail or other mediums of communication.
At most other companies I’ve had people message me about salary concerns, unionization, anger towards a manager or CEO, endless banter about anything but work, etc. The main difference was that these places were run by people who really didn’t care about their employees and slack ended up a reflection of that. A lot of upset, frustrated, resentful venting in private channels.
If slack didn’t exist, these conversations would have happened some other way. There’s no way everyone could keep sane in a bad work environment without some degree of venting or comradeship.
Having slack expose those faults in the management chain doesn't mean this is an employee/IC problem. These managers of the company should learn how to manage people better for $$$ they're (we're) getting paid for.
As others have mentioned, this is a professional communication tool there is no need for fully private conversations. Chats should always be accesible by HR/admins.
Employee problems as perceived from some random "CEO"'s perspective.
The article was instead that CEOs don’t want to get talked about behind their back and so are going to shut it down. While Slack might increase the ease of that, it’s not like employees couldn’t do it via email or at the water cooler instead. This speaks to leadership problems more than anything else.
Not being able to mute or suppress doesn't necessarily need HR if everybody thinks it's quirky and harmless fun. You're then the odd man out and ostracized for trying to do your job efficiently - it's pretty bogus, but until some HN user decides to create a new messaging channel. It's gotten to the point where people will avoid seeing you in person but just as quickly ask if you "got that slack" the second they do. It's like e-mail but now you're expected to have it on your phone, home computer, work computer - never a chance to say "no" because you didn't feel like reading it at the time even as it's 9 pm on a Monday night. It's invasive and turns work banter into privatized logs of discussion - from an entry level POV this is terrible.
It's a requirement at my job, but no one is required to respond right away. Just in a reasonable time frame. Sometimes I have to wait 15 to 30 minutes before I get a response to a message and it's similar to how long people may wait for me to respond to them.
> It's gotten to the point where people will avoid seeing you in person but just as quickly ask if you "got that slack"
Before we had to start working from home, people would typically come to my desk to talk if they wanted me to look at something. If it was someone from another office, the same time frame as I described earlier for replying to a message was perfectly fine and no one complained about it. We've been using Slack for 2 years at my workplace.
> It's like e-mail but now you're expected to have it on your phone, home computer, work computer
I actually use an older smartphone that won't work with Slack (Nokia N9). It used to work when Slack had an IRC gateway, but not now. I also tell my employer that I refuse to install any work related software on my personal devices and they're fine with that. If it was that important, then they can provide me with company issued devices. So far, they haven't bothered.
As for notifications, it's up to you if you want to enable them and it applies to any type of chat client, not just Slack. I prefer just checking it periodically during work hours and any messages that I receive, I'll reply when I check for them. What you describe is a problem at the business level as opposed to a specific chat client.
For me, I would rather use a less resource intensive IM framework like IRC over Slack, mainly because it's a resource hog and frequently has significant UI lag when running it in a Firefox tab (to the point where I have to wait 3 to 5 seconds for text I type to show up on the screen).
Or you could mute notifications except for @mentions and @all and tell them to use that if they need you.
My company's approach is just that bot posts go in their own dedicated channels that anyone can mute or watch as they see fit. That works ok for us. But it doesn't give someone that option in a company that allows bot posts in any channel.
If Slack allowed me to ignore others, then I would be accountable for missing any important messages. I am okay with having that responsibility.
I am surprised that sort of behaviour is even allowed. The places I've worked would've probably given such an employee a very strong reprimand. Then again, they've also had clear policies about not... slacking off with the company's resources.
That said, there are a few thirdparty clients; you might like the text-only ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20500880
Really though, having the ability to ignore _bots_ would be quite useful, a lot of noise comes from bots that might be useful to some of my coworkers, but not others, even in the same channel.
And also ignoring highlights from particular people too
I won't understand the backlash when it comes, just as I didn't understand the excitement. Slack is just a chat client. Chat has been around forever. Corporate chat clients have been around forever. What am I missing?
Just as an example, "heres a new feature" vs "heres a new feature (+100 thumbs up emoji)", for better or worse that changes people.
As did emoticons. I miss emoticons.
We recently migrated from HipChat to Slack - everyone was very excited because Atlassian is not as hip as Slack.
Well, turns out emoticons are so small you can't see them, karma works better on HipChat, the client is RAM heavy for no reason.
Overall it is pretty much the same but a small downgrade in experience and increase in cost. Oh, well.
I personally find myself doing the opposite and censoring myself on slack, because I know a comment that's funny in context might read terribly a year removed.
Blaming chat for having had a catalytic effect on a toxic corporate culture may underscore the toxicity of the culture.
Maybe a cultural detox would be in order?
Well. It's called chatter. That will either happen over the watercooler, or it will happen over text. The only problem is that off the cuff remarks can be part of the permanent record now. But otherwise, they should be harmless.
And also... maybe go fix the problems people are "bearish" about? (also what's this stock market lingo doing here)
> The problematic employee, the employee who would sit around at the lunchroom and tell people how bad this place is
Well, maybe the place IS bad. And if they are bitching about it, they may still care – employees who have "checked out" won't complain nearly as much (or at all), while looking elsewhere. Or maybe they are just venting and had a bad week. Or it's a cry for help. If the place weren't as bad, other employees could help the person.
> and it’s amplifying.
Oh, so other people agree with the person too? Maybe there is a problem indeed.
Like at startups, there are often a ton of problems, naturally. At some startups people complain a lot. At some they’re good at fixing or ignoring problem for some greater goal. Aiming for the latter (I.e not amplifying) should be a goal as well while you reduce your problems.
I don't think you appreciate the scale of how many headaches this can create for a large company. Previously, A says something mean about B at the watercooler, even if somebody overhears it's all he says, she says. With Slack (or any other group chat/IM system), if A says the same thing, it's broadcast to everybody else on the channel and anybody can take out of context screenshots and run squealing to HR/EEOC/lawyers/whoever. And it's all accessible to anybody with a subpoena on a fishing expedition as well.
And you can't just fix the company or the people: beyond a certain scale, no matter how good your hiring process and training, no matter how awesome your company culture and benefits, you'll get permanently unhappy people, shit-stirring trolls, wackos with extreme views and all the other weird creatures that populate any Internet forum. So eventually you have to converge on reserving chat only for strictly work-related comms and training people to take anything with the mildest whiff of controversy to talking in person/over video.
Slack has no priority levels. Slack pings you: is it an alert, a question, an outage, or someone sending you a funny gif? You can’t adjust the relative priority of these alerts, so good luck!
I’ve also seen that it regularly replaces documentation for teams. This is an issue, since slack just scrolls forever. You might have memorized the precise sentence to search for (I’ve done this), but good luck to everyone else.
All in all I think more companies would be better off with just IRC for ephemeral chats. IRC sets no expectation that you’ll catch up with everything that happened when you were offline, which in this case is good.
I'm starting to notice that organizations with long term remote experience like Basecamp and Automatic rely a lot more on longer, async communication over instant messaging. There might be something to that.
Doesn't the Threads view (Ctrl T, Mac: Cmd T) list all threads you're involved with in chronological order, navigable by mouse or keyboard, and searchable? What's your pain point with threads?
> the fact that there's no way for all 7 people DMing me at once to see that there are 7 of them DMing me at once
This same objection applies to every other text-based communication medium out there that I'm aware of.
Instead, create groups for whatever purpose and use it (eg, an @<team>_devs to avoid blowing up everyone else in the channel). @mentions stand out when you're scrolling through a feed.
The one anti-pattern personality that Slack does mitigate well is people who use in person meetings and phone calls to make after the fact misrepresentations, and I suppose, sales.
To that end, Slack, being a communications enabler, merely accelerates the rate of these things happening. You can turn it off, but then you can turn off the company too. You can try to make everything out in the open open, but then you quench creativity as well as meaningful 1-1 interactions between people.
To me, if there were a backlash against Slack, it is because it makes a great scapegoat. It's different from a social media platform because social platforms have to deal with the public, where a company has every tool it needs to evolve its culture. Personally, I think Slack could be a much needed twitter-killer by letting channels and instances promote messages to being public facing, while providing much of the value twitter doesn't.
I had to read this comment a few times, because I think it's truly a wonderful insight.
This is true for many things. We should be careful as leaders to espouse and reward the same practices. We should be careful as the led to see what people actually reward and ignore what they espouse.
My current company is full of "histrionics and complaining". It is almost entirely (but not completely) kids who would have been too young to be in software 7 years ago. The cause of this, in my experience, is a generational culture shift that seems to have done away with the common etiquette of keeping politics and agitation away from work.
The crux of this is that Slack enables long, heated arguments that normally would be defused by:
1. Being surrounded by your coworkers
2. The frown of your manager
3. The strain on the faces of those around you
It basically comes down to 80s/90s era concepts of netiquette: try to imagine that the person you're writing your response to is a thinking and feeling individual, and imagine their reaction to your words. Read out your words that you've written in the heat of the moment and think hard about how they'll be felt when read.
If you have an employee who is prone to ridiculing others and won't desist from doing so when asked...
FIRE
THEM
>FIRE
>THEM
Honestly, why does this have anything to do with slack. If it's not there, it will be in the break room or hallway or bathroom or wherever. That's a toxic person being enabled by technology. Not toxic technology magically transforming a person.
It also reduces the dampening influences of people's emotional responses in meatspace.
Slack may or may not be better/worse than FB, Twitter, etc. in this regard, but all can definitely magnify divisions in any group of people, from a clique to a nation.
It is just the dark side of reducing the communication friction that helps people work together better (kind of like a hammer is better than a rock for both setting nails and breaking skulls).
I also wonder if tech ageism isn't at play here. The social rules of high-school and college are nothing like the social rules of the rest of society. In those places, a person can create a group of friends and only interact with them for the most part.
In a real job without high turnover, you have to learn to get along with everyone all the time. Startups (the ones complaining here) aren't known for having lots of older workers who've had time to polish their social skills and have the rough edges worn down (programmers generally aren't known for their amazing social skills in the first place).
I'd conjecture that moving 2-3 older devs onto each of those teams could drastically improve the group dynamics.
The one good thing in this, is that, although these social media platforms can amplify and spread the toxicity, they can also make it a lot easier to identify & document.
Recent pandemic events notwithstanding...
I'm also a bit gun shy about firing the "problem individual" since I've generally found that particular individual is often the one caught replying and not the instigator. YMMV.
Nuance and context and all that.
The "heads should roll" thing works but make sure its well targeted and for accurate cause.