Slack

Direct messages

We use Slack for short chats. Because it's a chat tool it's a powerful and direct way to communicate with a colleague. Some guidelines:

• If you have a specific question that does not need to be answered right away and if the question is task related, it's probably best to ask the question in the Clickup task.

• You always have to consider where to ask your question (Clickup or Slack). Sure, asking direct questions is great. It might help you move on with your activities. But always consider this: if you are chatting with a colleague for some help, that colleague will get distracted from their own task. So from your own perspective it seems for the best if you can move on, but always take in account that you are distracting a colleague from their own work.

• This does not mean you cannot Slack a colleague. Please do Slack them if you need him or her. But make sure that you don't distract your colleagues too much. If you have many questions that need to be answered, it's probably best to bundle them and ask them at once / or in a meeting / standup.

• If someone has set their status to 'away' you can sent them a message. but it's probably better to wait. Even though they will not receive a notification, they might still be disturbed.

Group chats

Group chats all serve their unique purpose. Most notably:

• Ops. If you are member of the development team you may be assigned to the Ops channel. The Ops channel will notify the team about important devops related events, like incoming support tickets, deployments to production, server statistics, failed end2end testing or any other meaningful devops event.

• General. For general notifications, general team standups (on Friday's), announcements or for just saying goodmorning.

• Random. For the funny stuff.

There are also channels dedicated to certain projects or teams. You will be invited for these when you are included in one of these teams.

You can send a notification to the entire channel by using a @here or a @channel. With a @channel you are notifying everyone who has access to the channel, regardless off online/away/offline status. Only use this for important messages which should be read by everyone, regardless of status. @here is a bit more subtle. If will only notify the actual online channel members.

Examples:

@here I need some help with task https://app.clickup.com/t/xxxxxxx, does anyone from the project management team has time to help me out?

@channel The building is on fire! Please exit the building immediately. Avoid the fire!

On a serious note: you can use @channel when you think it's best. Just take in account that you are also notifying offline channel members. How bigger the channel is in group size, how bigger of an annoyance that might be.