I think I'm officially bored of the "Slack is a problem" threads.
Just spent time in a dev org where 500+ members of a technical team used email, Teams & Slack. However you want to slice it, there are organizational habits of a department that large, and nothing deep in a licensed product stack is likely to fix/influence how a big dept runs itself.
They superficially used all the enterprise tools at their disposal, because relying on implementations complicated enough to need documentation wouldn't live long in a big org that had lots of turnover (how's your Sharepoint doing?).
Said team had people at all levels who were unreachable in any way, except when you slacked them. You disrupted them, told them they'd ignored an email that you really needed a response to, and they gave you what you needed. Slack fixed the "I'm ignoring my inbox and I have 40K unread emails in there" problem that feels typical in enterprises.
Teams worked to connect tech and non-tech business units. It helped to keep business teams off Slack.
Slack was noisy for the ops team.
How Slack is supposed to "fix" disorganized, i-don't-care-about-management principles of big departments is beyond me.
The flip side: the business thrived, everyone worked pretty sane house, and the paychecks arrived every other week without fail.
There was a lot to complain about, but no one ever complained about Slack (or even Teams).
You're saying that email was overloaded so people turned to slack instead?
People can change how notifications are handled for email too, so that is not at all new and I think that changing communications to a proprietary protocol instead of configuring an email client is stupid.
I disabled notifications for both email and slack. If it's important, send me a text or give me a call, except between the hours of 11 PM and 8 AM when the phone is on silent mode. I honestly don't know how people exist with all these interruptions. Turn them off.
Yeah, sure. And I usually build up a set of filters and rules so that my inbox is manageable, but I think the compassionate point of view is that email is loaded with more disposable and management heavy communications than slack tends to be.
I have seen plenty of bad practices in slack. In particular, there is more and more of a tendency to treat slack as "publication of record" as opposed to "ephemeral missives".
Configuring is stupid. People need to be able to work in different environments, so software needs to do the right thing by default.
Email doesn't distinguish between messages that can be actioned by any one of a group and messages that need to be actioned by you specifically (there are a bunch of unreliable hacks that sort of work most of the time). So you're never going to be able to get the right notification behaviour in a reliable way.
You're treating two different forms of communication as if they were the same. Slack is organised by person and topic, while email is just a large sack of messages, possibly ranked and divided in a few folders. I find Slack's model much more efficient.
The problem I have with Slack’s model is that it’s inflexible and I’m unable to organize things in a way that makes sense to me. With email the only constant is messages and threads. I’m free to organize or tag these artifacts however I want
Just spent time in a dev org where 500+ members of a technical team used email, Teams & Slack. However you want to slice it, there are organizational habits of a department that large, and nothing deep in a licensed product stack is likely to fix/influence how a big dept runs itself.
They superficially used all the enterprise tools at their disposal, because relying on implementations complicated enough to need documentation wouldn't live long in a big org that had lots of turnover (how's your Sharepoint doing?).
Said team had people at all levels who were unreachable in any way, except when you slacked them. You disrupted them, told them they'd ignored an email that you really needed a response to, and they gave you what you needed. Slack fixed the "I'm ignoring my inbox and I have 40K unread emails in there" problem that feels typical in enterprises.
Teams worked to connect tech and non-tech business units. It helped to keep business teams off Slack.
Slack was noisy for the ops team.
How Slack is supposed to "fix" disorganized, i-don't-care-about-management principles of big departments is beyond me.
The flip side: the business thrived, everyone worked pretty sane house, and the paychecks arrived every other week without fail.
There was a lot to complain about, but no one ever complained about Slack (or even Teams).