Is Slack Ruining Work? (vox.com) 102
Though Slack's web site promises that "Slack is where work happens," Vox argues instead that "an increasing emphasis on new technology to moderate our workdays isn't necessarily making our work better or making us more productive. If wielded poorly, it can even make it worse.
Slack is one of numerous types of workplace software that companies are using to facilitate collaboration and communication in an increasingly digital world. Teams comes as part of Microsoft's pervasive Office offerings like Word and Excel. Google's G Suite includes Gmail, Hangouts Chat and Meet, and Calendar as well as its cloud-based document-sharing programs. And Facebook has entered the game, too, with Workplace, an attempt to get its 2.7 billion users to employ its products in more productive ways than sharing conspiracy theories...
Much like the ubiquitous open-floor plan, this type of software is meant to get different parts of a company working together, to break down hierarchies, to spark chance interactions and innovations. In practice it can be hell. The addition of yet another communications tool can result in a surfeit of information....
Keeping up with these conversations can seem like a full-time job. After a while, the software goes from helping you work to making it impossible to get work done. Also, workplace software doesn't seem to have supplanted the very thing it was supposed to fix: email. Most people use both... People now have the problem of too many emails, too many meetings, and too many messages. For them, workplace chat software has become just one more demand on their time.
One productivity analytics company even reports that at ten companies (with 500+ employees) they found more Slack channels than there were employees.
Much like the ubiquitous open-floor plan, this type of software is meant to get different parts of a company working together, to break down hierarchies, to spark chance interactions and innovations. In practice it can be hell. The addition of yet another communications tool can result in a surfeit of information....
Keeping up with these conversations can seem like a full-time job. After a while, the software goes from helping you work to making it impossible to get work done. Also, workplace software doesn't seem to have supplanted the very thing it was supposed to fix: email. Most people use both... People now have the problem of too many emails, too many meetings, and too many messages. For them, workplace chat software has become just one more demand on their time.
One productivity analytics company even reports that at ten companies (with 500+ employees) they found more Slack channels than there were employees.
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It's what Californians do with ocean waves for fun. Surfeit!
100% (Score:2)
King John (of Magna Carta fame) died from a surfeit of palfreys, or so the book says.
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Still, in the context of summary, its meaning can be determined. Unlike a lot of /. summaries, where the entire summary (and often half the linked story) fail to explain what the story is about, never defining the acronym or phrase key to the story.
Or worse, a corporate site that exclaims how much better they are at doing whatever it is they do than anyone else who thinks they're doing the same thing, without mentioning what the hell it is that they do.
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Oh my gosh... (Score:5, Insightful)
People realizes that communication software was available before Slack? Not that I disagree that open floors and other stuff is a distraction...
But consider my case: I do home office since 2007. So, basically I need to use a software to talk with the team. And, Slack, can even be configured to sleep for some minutes or hours, which I do when I have to tasks that require mind focus.
And, Slack is a way better than the previous tools. I remember when some companies used NetMeeting, Google Talk, and the works, Sametime (unstable, hugh memory usage). Yeap, IRC was fine. But Slack has some simple improvements: it'll send you an email if you're not in your desk, or a mobile message, it's good with video. And, if you don't want to be disturbed, you can close your email software and put your mobile in silence, which I do too in the same tasks that require mind focus.
So, concluding: I agree that companies are doing a lot to disturb the peace of the office. This is the reason why I love home office. But tools like Slack are required and you should turn if off when you have to focus. And current generation is really bad on this (focusing on any task). The only cons of home office... https://theoatmeal.com/comics/... [theoatmeal.com]
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I guess in this situation I don’t see what sets Slack above the other solutions which have already existed for years or even decades.
I know these tools are useful under certain situations... I just haven’t seen them adding value first hand. In my workspace, I see them mainly used for time-wasting, productivity-killing micromanagement by the dysfunctional higher-ups and for non-work chat by my peers and co-workers - so I keep them turned off. FWIW I also turn off email and my phone when I need to
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Read that whole comment carefully. I would guess that either (i) the author isn't a native Engilsh speaker, even though the name seems to indicate that, or (ii) the whole thing was generated by some kind of "AI" software.
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Thanks for the Oatmeal link, man. It's a good one :)
Yes (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Yes (Score:1)
It would be BETTER handled in email. All that friction and inconvenience people hate about email is simply the discipline and etiquette that differentiates effective conmunication from noise.
Lazy people (slackers) love Slack. And Slack reinforces itself because it is so poor at organizing communication that people have to use it more to get things done.
Driving engagement is not an unalloyed virtue.
Unless your team gets paid to chat with each other all day, Slack is harming your prospects.
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This. Imagine having to think about what you want to say and organising your thoughts before starting writing instead of umm, walking over and ... that ... umm ... thing.
Same (Score:3, Interesting)
We use slack at work and it is toxic. People keep opening up ever-more topic-specific channels, and they expect that every person they invite will pay attention to every post that is made (including and despite the long chains of joking-around posts).
And everybody demands attention by very frequently using the @here post so that you are constantly nagged by new message notifications.
The flood of information is absolutely too much, and I can't concentrate on any task long enough to make progress unless I co
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Use do-not-disturb for concentration time. Take 5 seconds to adjust the notification settings on channels that you don't specifically need to be alerted for @here or @channel - they give you a nice checkbox for that per channel.
That was hard. Calling something "toxic" when you just haven't bothered to learn how to use it is awesome.
No, instead bitch incessantly about a tool that may not be as useful for you, but is very useful for others. Because that's never as (or more) annoying than the stuff you are
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We use slack at work and it is toxic. People keep opening up ever-more topic-specific channels, and they expect that every person they invite will pay attention to every post that is made (including and despite the long chains of joking-around posts).
And everybody demands attention by very frequently using the @here post so that you are constantly nagged by new message notifications.
The flood of information is absolutely too much, and I can't concentrate on any task long enough to make progress unless I consciously ignore slack. Which I do. Which creates social problems because people assume I know every little thing everyone of them has posted, and they react with indignation when they find out I have been ignoring their channels.
I don't like it at all. But management requires that we use it, despite these complaints raised by me and others.
Do you work where I do? I'm pretty sure you do, but if not, one you didn't mention was that we have a system where when something breaks an event has to be created to tell everyone and guess where all conversation takes place? A custom slack channel. Every day, five or six custom slack channels are created to discuss whatever it was that went wrong. Good luck finding those (or any information in them) the next day, to say nothing of the next week.
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It really couldn't. Email is never going to be be great at multi-person or real-time conversations, or at accessing thread history. My employer uses Slack extensively, and email infrequently. The majority of the email messages I get at work are from GitHub and Jira. Slack has far and away delivered a superior experience especially for non-colocated teams.
TFA seems to assume that substantial amounts of communication happen in addition to Slack. At a previous employer we depended heavily on email -- whic
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Slack can be used with an IRC client, assuming you enable the option...
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Except I cant do much because I'm spending all goddam day monitoring these bloody communication schemes. They dont help us do work they just waste our time
Surveillance Culture (Score:5, Interesting)
Both SLACK and the "open office" floorplan are symptomatic of a larger culture of surveillance in our workplaces. The open office is the spiritual successor to the panopticon, and SLACK is an acronym: Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge. If that isn't Orwellian to you, you're part of the problem.
Re: Surveillance Culture (Score:4, Informative)
That's one of thee reason's I avoid using Slack. We get about a week of conversation history before the messages fall off the back end, but that is because we use the free version and it only exposes the newest 10K messages. The problem is that some very useful information is in the Slack channels, and a lot of decisions are made and explained in the channels, but we can't pull up those conversations unless we pay Slack's exorbitant fees.
$8,000 per year for an organization of 100 people seems a bit steep for a chat program. If we want e-discovery, which we would have to do if we get sued and have to search message history across all users, it will cost at least $1,500 per month. Slack doesn't publicize their enterprise level pricing.
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MatterMost might be worth a look; it's cheaper than Slack [mattermost.com]
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You think that because it doesn't show them to you that it isn't keeping your info somewhere? That's almost cute.
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You think that because it doesn't show them to you that it isn't keeping your info somewhere? That's almost cute.
There's nothing in his post that indicates he thinks that.
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Exactly, they are paying you $100,000+ a year for typing things into a computer, how DARE they keep track of what you are doing in the process!
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Believe me, I get it, but at the same time you're being paid to work, and all the work you're doing belongs to the company at the end of the day. It's the contract you struck with them in return for money. We use Spark heavily because in our line we constantly have to trade bits of information such as the status of an asset or getting faster feedback rather than waiting for formal reviews. I can't imagine not having it. If someone is in a crunch they'll typically ignore it(we don't have enforced alarms or
The right tool for the job, and a bit of training (Score:4, Interesting)
workplace software doesn't seem to have supplanted the very thing it was supposed to fix: email
Why is everyone so hell-bent on fixing email? Email has its place, and it is a very useful tool when used right. If it's being used incorrectly (like it often is), replacing it with a different tool probably will only result in the new tool being abused instead. Same with Slack, Yammer, Hangouts, Confluence, message boards etc: they are all useful tools when used correctly, and horrible time-wasters when they're not. Educate your employees, which admittedly is not always easy since the way people communicate is part of the corporate culture.
I've been involved in rolling out several of these tools in companies. Almost all of the successful ones had one thing in common: they were managed, or curated if you prefer, by a community manager, information manager, or volunteers. For email that worked a little differently, but I have seen some cases where strong and frequently reinforced lessons on email hygiene made a difference, though only at team / department level.
Re: The right tool for the job, and a bit of train (Score:3)
Slack is fine... (Score:1)
No. (Score:1)
Betteridge's law of headlines applies here. [wikipedia.org]
Slack is an incredibly useful tool. I might go so far as to say invaluable when you are working with a distributed remote team.
If you find that it's tanking your productivity, then either you are using it wrong, or your organization has a cultural problem.
So long as there is a rule that the random chit chat and the important messages are kept in separate channels, then it's fine
Was IRC ruining work? (Score:3)
If the answer in your workplace is yes; then, yes, Slack will also ruin your work.
If the answer in your workplace is no; then, no, Slack will not ruin your work.
It really just depends on the workplace culture. But the only significant difference between IRC and slack are the integrations. And I'm pretty sure that someone somewhere actually *has* figured out howto trigger deployments or respond to PagerDuty alerts from IRC too. Slack just makes that easier to set up. So, if your coworkers are reasonable and respectful people who wouldn't turn an IRC channel to shit, then Slack is fine. If your coworkers are total asshats who would be kickbanned by any responsible IRC mod, then Slack will be crap too.
Now, that open-plan office OTOH... that needs to die in a fire; and whoever came up with the idea in the first place; very severely punished.
Worked for us (Score:2)
Re: Worked for us (Score:1)
Can we get some reasons that slack is so much better or are we just getting paid to say slack is great?
(I'd like to know, we only Ever had teams and I've got my fair share of gripes)
It's not the tool, its the management (Score:3)
I rarely meet a tool that is actually all that bad.
What I do see is a bunch of middle managers, morons, developers, administrators, and project managers trying to make tools do things they were not exactly intended to do because they are ignorant and listened to some stupid sales guys rather than their just testing if the application can live up to hype.
I constantly see business buy different tools that do much the same thing because when the tool was acquired by the business it was setup for only 1 team in mind which set it up to work great for them but not for anyone else. And of course, the tool should not be used in any other way than they proscribe it.
there is never any time to work on these tools so that they work well for the business, but there sure is enough time to push the product into production with everyone else kicking and screaming, like it or not.
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Modern management is a nightmare invented by people who love reality shows.
You don't encourage collaboration. You get the hell out of the way and let it happen. "You've got to use this software," "I've assigned you to this team" and "this open office concept where nobody can talk to each other due to the cocktail party effect" are barriers to natural collaboration.
Avoiding hierarchies is as simple as firing anyone who thinks how many people you have "under you" is some kind of a quality metric.
Church of the SubGenius (Score:2)
Anyone else see the title and think this was to do with J. R. "Bob" Dobbs and all that?
I'd say our workplace implements Slack pretty well (Score:4, Interesting)
When we considered using it, though? It was carefully planned out over months, with only a small group of I.T. staff and a couple people in management having access to a trial of it, with only a few limited channels set up.
I think the worst thing you can do with ANY of these instant messaging packages is to deploy it without a whole plan in place about WHICH channels would be productive to set up, and WHO will have access to create or modify them.
In our case, we had to come up with a small group of default channels to auto-join with each new employee account set up in Slack. If a channel can't offset numerous email threads or streams of phone calls/voice mails, then it's probably not productive to have it.
One of our channels, for example, is "Announcements", where management can broadcast anything of general relevance to the company. One of our offices just bought new furniture and cabinets, for example. So they sent out a Slack message about it, instructing people to work from home one day next week while it's being installed. H.R. posts all of the work anniversary and birthday announcements in there too, instead of shooting them all out as email like they used to do.
In I.T., we created several Slack channels that are only used by our group. One of them is for "change control". Any time one of us makes a change on a server or on the network, we post it in there for the rest of the team to be aware of it. Another is "Notifications" - a channel where pretty much all the traffic is automated, coming from various services like our VoIP phone provider or DropBox. It's a one stop place to glance at for info on any service outages or applications generating errors.
Then, we have freelance workers who we only set up in Slack on an "as needed" basis, as "single channel users". They all get joined to a Slack channel created just for discussion about whatever project they're working on with a team.
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We tried the same approach (at an engineering firm), but it ended up being nearly impossible to get people to use it “correctly.” I really struggle to understand what people love about it, despite understanding what it should accomplish, and hating email chains that should be using chat.
For my needs, the process of creating a channel for each category of discussion was what killed it. There were too many unions and intersections of logical discussions or topics that each channel either became
Facebook Workplace, hah! (Score:1)
2 Slacks. Company and rant. (Score:2)
Standard News Cycle (Score:3)
3 Years Ago: "Slack is revolutionizing work communication!"
Today: "Slack is destroying work communication!"
Go look up those hilarious "Local News" best-of hype reels. "This common household product is killing your pets!" "This common food additive is more addictive than cocaine!"
"This common tool can be misused! Is *your* workplace being destroyed by it?"
The proverbial hammer, applied to screws and nails (Score:2)
It can be used well, and individuals can enjoy it, but trying to use it as a universal tool and/or panacea leads to one of it's worst use cases...
It's just like being in a room where everyone is constantly exclaiming "ooh, shiny!"
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It's Like Fire (Score:2)
If wielded poorly, it can burn your house down.
It's a tool, not a panacea. Use it the right way or it will harm you.
Slack reduces managers? (Score:2)
It's how you use it... (Score:2)
The last time I worked in a developer group, we used an IM app to communicate across the office. The point was to avoid interrupting people and knocking them out of the zone: They could easily mute the IMs, and look at them when they took a break. We tried to avoid using the phone, or physically walking to someone's desk and talking to them, for the same reason. Our group was pretty productive, despite an open-office plan.
I've seen other groups, though, where developers are constantly interrupted. The boss
The ideal workplace communication tool (Score:2)
No more than 10 outbound emails to addresses internal to the organization permitted per day.
Communicate wisely. The time and attention of workers whose main skill and job is to intensely focus on difficult technical problems, is precious.
In almost all cases, a live collaborative design session in a multi-whiteboard room is far superior to on-screen colla
And after Slack comes .. (Score:1)
I'm OK with using Slack instead of Lync (now called "Skype with tail-fins" or some such name). Your discussion doesn't go away immediately when you log off, which can be a plus for those of us who have to stop our computers from time to time. And it works on my phone. Plus, my boss's boss likes it. A lot. So, I'm more than OK with Slack.
But when somebody at work wants to know if I'm on Instagram or Yammer or some other messaging platform, I'm just saying "No". Here we have e-mail and Lync and Slack.
too many options (Score:1)
and noone knew where anything was. Sure, there were all these "collaboration tools", but we only needed 1.