Slack has become the communication platform of choice for many US and international businesses, especially for remote teams, but it's also gained a reputation among many users as a massive distraction.
However, Slack’s impact on your team, whether positive or negative, is all in how you use it. Here are four tips for using Slack (or communicating by any means, really) effectively:

  1. Encourage Burstiness

For Slack to be an effective tool, workers cannot have constant ongoing conversations with slow response time. This type of communication disrupts workflow and kills productivity. Instead, teams should aim for burstiness. “Remote teams who communicate in bursts—exchanging messages quickly during periods of high activity—perform much better than remote teams whose conversations involve long lag time between responses and are spread across multiple topic threads.”¹ Workers need to truly be present for the important conversations, provide input, and then return to focused work.

  2. Respond Quickly

Replying to questions quickly must become habit for managers and productive team members. Not only does it spark burstiness, but it raises employee satisfaction and team cohesiveness. Research by Duncan Watts of Columbia University has shown that “email response time is the single best predictor of whether employees are satisfied with their boss.”² The same can be assumed for other text based applications, like Slack.

Of course, replying fast to every inquiry without having constant conversation may sound like an oxymoron to some highly sought after managers. This is why it is important to prioritize and set boundaries and expectations. Create channels for the important conversations, where input is needed quickly. You can then direct team members to other channels for non-urgent communication where burstiness is not a goal.

  3. Watch out for the Trough

Response time alone does not make a conversation productive. The ability to generate good ideas or project the appropriate tone depends largely on your mental state, this is especially important for managers to understand. Creating an environment where all team members are offering up ideas or asking important questions requires psychological safety.³ Creating psychological safety requires vigilance on the part of most managers, it does not always come naturally.

Author Daniel H. Pink explains in When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing that humans have three parts to the day: a peak, a trough, and a rebound. The specific times vary by person, but for most people the peak takes place in the morning, the trough in the afternoon, and the rebound in the evening. For the average person working 9-5, vigilance decreases as the day goes on. Aside from what this implies about how to prioritize tasks, it means how we speak to others and how others interpret our words can change over the course of the day. Pink also notes that research by Jing Chen and Baruch Lev of NYU, as well as Elizabeth Demers of UVA, has even shown that stock prices often fall and are temporarily mispriced when earnings calls take place in the afternoon rather than the morning.

As the day goes on, it becomes increasingly more important to stop and ask yourself “would I have responded the same way to this question or idea a few hours ago?” and “is this response consistent with the tone I want to set?”

  4. Do Not Empty the Water Cooler

In the pursuit of idea generating burstiness, do not hamper your team’s ability to have non-work related conversation. Separate studies by Lynn Wu of Wharton and Amir Goldberg of Stanford have shown that employees are more likely to stay with a company when their communications include more swear words and references to their family, sports, lunch, and coffee.⁴ Even these interactions should remain bursty. Separate channels may need to be set for these conversations in order to keep track of priorities, but make sure those conversations still happen, creative ideas can often be generated from what started as an off-topic conversation.

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References and Further Reading:

1. Riedl, C., Williams A.W., (2018, May 29) “Bursty Communication Can Help Remote Teams Thrive.” Retrieved from http://behavioralscientist.org/bursty-communication-can-help-remote-teams-thrive/

2. Pink, D. H. (2018). When - The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (p. 19, 208). Canongate Books.

3. Psychological safety: “The belief that you can take a risk without being penalized or punished” Grant, A. M. (2014). Give and take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success (p. 85). New York: Penguin Books.

4. Coyle, D. (2018). The Culture Code (p.77). Random House US.

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