Leverage Weekly #22 - Slack can be great, actually

Or how to use Slack everyday while never thinking about it

Leverage started using Slack in March 2016 and for many years it worked well, since Leverage functioned as a large social group. But then, following restructuring in July 2019, we needed to learn to use Slack in a new way. We’ve done that, and maybe our thoughts are helpful for those doing something similar.

Slack commonly has three main problems. They are (1) the inappropriate syncing problem, (2) the sorting problem and (3) the distraction problem. Inappropriate syncing occurs when people don’t know how they’re meant to be using the channels. This could mean being in the wrong channels, interacting incorrectly within channels or using Slack when a conversation is better.

The distraction problem happens when people end up paying attention to the wrong things and the sorting problem happens when people don’t know where to post or find things.

When you use Slack for a social group, these are less of a problem. That’s because coordination does not need to be as tight and roles are less important. It’s tolerable to communicate less efficiently, get distracted and mislay information. But when you start to use it in the context of a regular organization, you need a tighter ship and your systems need to complement rather than cut against the organizational structure.

Thankfully, since 2019 we’ve slowly solved the bulk of these problems and we’ve made almost no changes since our last revision in Dec 2022. The first step was restructuring our Slack in terms of topic. This means we now have a rather large number of channels. We use prefixes like engagement and operations, and have generic categories for each of the prefixes, like _general and _updates. This yields a whole bunch of Slack channels. Right now we have 34, with examples including culture_general, operations_legal and staff_retreats.

At first this took a while to get used to. But then we were much less distracted because the channels lined up very cleanly with our roles and we naturally knew how to manage our attention. It also solved the sorting problem because it was obvious where things should go and where to find things from the past.

The inappropriate syncing problem was helped by the new Slack setup because we knew who should be in what channels, but there was more that was necessary. We knew when and how to use Slack because we’ve also structured the rest of our internal communication. For example, we have a daily morning check-in, weekly planning, weekly meetings for programs and functions, time in leadership meetings for free-er form discussion and co-working time during the day. This took pressure off Slack to solve everything.

Over time, we’ve been able to reduce the number of channels. That has made it a little more lightweight, and we expect we’ll be able to reduce the number of channels even further in future. But it works really well for us right now and we hardly ever think about it. It feels like a building with the right number of rooms in the correct layout, i.e., it feels normal and we navigate smoothly.

I’m particularly interested in Slack because of my interest in organizational culture. Tools like Slack impact an organization’s culture but also help understand its culture. For example, if it feels like someone or something shouldn’t be in a channel it could be that your departments aren’t set up right or someone’s role is wrong.

This last point is important. While we have a way of using Slack, how we use Slack is connected to how we’ve set up the entire organization. So, despite the clickbait-y subtitle of this post, we actually think about organizations as organic wholes, where the parts need to be adjusted to one another in order to work. We think our approach to Slack works because we’ve set up the rest of the organization (programs, roles, etc.) pretty close to right.

This isn’t meant to discourage people. On a more macro level, we’ve been exploring adjusting all of the parts of the organization so that they fit each other and the organization’s mission, and we think that experimenting with Slack, like we did (and like you can do) can be a useful part of that.

We’ll soon get a chance to test our ideas around Slack (and organizations) in a new context. QuBiT needs an internal communication system that’s better than DMs and Notion, but they’ve had a bad experience with Slack before. (This was because they encountered all three problems noted above). We’re helping them to set up comms, so our plan is to start them with a small Slack and see how they use it, and break out new channels as the need arises, eventually yielding a Slack setup of the type we have currently.

Of course, every use case and culture is different, so we’ll have to see if this will work. For reforming the Leverage Slack, we needed to add a bunch of discipline. For helping QuBiT develop its internal communication, we need to make sure tools like Slack follow and positively influence the organization’s natural structure. And where that structure needs tweaking, finding ways to help them with that also.

Given that these are different organizations with different values and culture, it would be unsurprising if what works for QuBiT ends up looking different from what worked for us. I’m interested to see if that’s true and we’ll get a chance very soon.

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Oliver