
What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter - rbanffy
https://hbr.org/2017/11/what-managers-need-to-know-about-social-tools?_lrsc=8d4748d3-511b-4e25-896d-c2963ddacbc9
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timcederman
That is one of the worst examples of censoring names I've seen in an article.
I have to laugh that the example HBR give is for an anonymous "midsize media
company", when it is actually them. (e.g. Emily Ryan, product manager, Robert
Black, etc, all HBR employees)

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RandallBrown
The very best office collaboration tool I've used was a self hosted copy of
Reddit that was hooked into our ActiveDirectory for authentication.

We didn't have it too long before I left that company, so I'm not sure how it
turned out, but it was pretty excellent for discussing things.

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jacobwal
that sounds really cool. What was great about it?

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fujiters
Not OP, but threading. So many collaboration tools I've worked with are
indistinguishable from the comment section of a blog or newspaper. The vast
majority of the comments are useless, with people arguing over ridiculous
things, but there's no natural segregation of useful comments and useless, so
all you can do is scroll about hope to encounter something worth while.

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jacobwal
Thanks for sharing that, I'm a fan of threading as well but see a lot of Slack
groups that operate as though it wasn't an option

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tyingq
I'm somewhat lucky in that Jabber is popular, but optional, in my workplace.
So I can get away with never logging into it. I'm sure, though, there's some
price I pay for opting out of the idea.

Personally, the idea that anyone is arbitrarily welcome to interrupt your
chosen way to work is silly.

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thinkmassive
Chat allows you to read and respond at your own convenience. If you’re not
using chat, and someone is hoping for a response faster than email, they’re
likely to interrupt you in a way that’s far more disruptive than chat, like
walking up in person or calling on the phone.

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gregmac
This is definitely an attitude you need to set within the company culture -
chat != instant. At least not initially - once a conversation gets going, it's
much faster in chat than via email.

We ask people not to use private chat (with varying degrees of success) but
instead ask in channel, even if it's to a specific person:

1\. It helps others reading the channel learn

2\. If someone else is around and knows the answer, they can provide it

You sometimes have to reply in channel (and copy+paste the question) to get
this point across, but it generally seems to work well.

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auntad
I can understand the points about social aspects at work, but some of the
content concerning more tangible business benefits seems too idealistic. e.g.
"I suddenly remembered that I’d seen a communication exchanged between these
two guys.." \-- how often do you _happen_ to remember seeing that kind of
conversation? Imagine these tools are barely making a dent in the amount of
duplication and lack of "metaknowledge" that goes on in any mid to large sized
company. And that comes with the oft-cited costs of distractions, etc. Or am I
just using them wrong?

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EamonnMR
Slack's "pay to search archives" feature is really ingenious. What content
will people pay for? Content that they created!

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davidbanham
I've actually come to regard Slack Archives as a negative feature.

I work with a lot of different companies. They almost universally have Slack
instances that get used for discussion. One time I was working with a client
who was too tight to actually pay for their Slack instance so it had amnesia.

For a while I was really grouchy about it. Then one day I was thinking along
the lines of "Ah this is such a PITA. I've just had this good discussion about
these requirements in Slack but because it's not a paid instance it'll vanish
in a few days. Grr I'll have to take this information and put it somewhere
else. I guess I'll stick it in a design document in the project's wiki. This
is such an inconven... wait. Huh. That's vastly better than leaving it
floating somewhere in Slack. Oh."

And in that moment, I was enlightened. Paying for Slack actually makes it a
worse tool.

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jacobwal
would you use something that made it easy for you to save stuff from Slack in
another place where it wasn't floating around? Like how you can star something
for yourself, but instead you could star something so that your entire team
could see that this was an important message?

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davidbanham
I might. I think the value for me would hinge on how easy it was to
contextualise the information.

Like if it was just a big list of "Stuff people have starred in Slack" I would
not use it.

If it was a repository of information categorised by project and subject,
maybe with a little blurb of info to give me a summary of it, then under all
that a link to the source material if I still needed it, that might be
compelling.

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jacobwal
Thanks for sharing that. A few friends and I are trying to explore a product
in this space, and what you said is pretty much what we've arrived at as well.
If you have any other feedback you think we should keep in mind I'm all ears

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mooreds
I love our company's internal slack for all the reasons listed in the article.
Though we haven't reached the size that we'd actually need it (small company).
We did decide to pay for it for the unlimited searching of archives. It is
also nice because it gives me a permanent URL pointing to discussions that I
can put in issues or commit messages.

But the first thing I do when I install slack anywhere is turn off all the
notifications (or disallow them).

Letting anyone interrupt my thinking anywhere? No thanks.

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djhworld
At work we use Slack, at least on the engineering side of the organisation.
Not sure on the concrete numbers but I'd hazard a guess that we have 1000+
users on there.

There is Yammer too, but I've never seen anyone use it.

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ImaCake
Can anyone explain how these tools are better than email? They seem to just be
email in a messenger format, which changes the expectations. But you could do
the same to email with the right UI.

EDIT: excuse my ignorance, I don't have much experience using these tools.

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bonesss
> Can anyone explain how these tools are better than email?

Communication tools exist along multiple axes of effort, permanence, content-
bandwidth, and discoverability.

A conversation takes little effort, is high content-bandwidth (body language,
tone, whiteboarding, pointing, etc), but is impossible to discover for others
and is impermanent. A formal specification is more permanent, and more
discoverable, but has a bit less content-bandwidth and is a high effort
activity. Old school SMSs are low-effort and permanent, but not discoverable
and prone to confusion because of low content-bandwidth.

Email is kinda 'middle of the tree' all round. It's primary failing for the
Entperise is the point-to-point nature of discussion (removing the ability for
third parties to discover it). This can be mitigated with use of appropriate
groups or tools (internal mailing lists, Sharepoint-ish blobs), but that's a
challenge in and of itself...

So how is Slack better than Email? It's better in the way my cheese knife is
better than my bread knife. And Slack is as much a threat to email as my
cheese knife is to my bread knife... They are complimentary tools that address
slightly different needs on a related spectrum, and will be painful if
misapplied to the wrong problems. I _can_ cut cheese with a bread knife, I
_can_ cut bread with a cheese knife. I _can_ make Slack my total communication
system, I _can_ pretend that email is enough ;)

Right tool for the job, don't do dumb things, and if you can't figure out how
immature use of a _pling-pling-pling-pling-pling_ chat system is gonna wreck
your day-to-day work experience... ... I assume we have worked together before
and you were in charge of choosing the internal communication system...

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ImaCake
Thanks for taking the time to reply with a well-thought out response :)

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xorxarle
I'm not sure how effective or distributed the best knowledgebase softwares are
(ours is OneNote and it isn't working IMO), but I think having the knowledge
at your fingertips would be far less distracting than a minimum of two people
occupying each other's mental resources long enough to exchange IP. Then what
if people leave and take the IP with them. Have there been studies
specifically measuring distractability or overall work performance
with/without distracting instant messaging...? I'm not convinced these IM
tools are the answer, but maybe with some sort of "Guide"/KB integration
coupled with ML.

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coldacid
OneNote is probably not working as KB software for you because it's not meant
to be that. Consider it as a personal scrapbook with pages you might show to
other people, and get a proper KB platform.

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bonesss
OneNote works pretty well as a glorified wiki in small groups.

Naturally, these days, if that's what you need why not get a proper wiki
going? I do know for some MS shops the pre-paid OneNote licenses make it a
tempting substitute.

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jacobwal
For those who use Slack at work:

Do you often use old conversations that your teammates have had to solve
problems? Do you search Slack to find it? I've never been in a large Slack
team and I'm curious how many people actually do that.

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EamonnMR
I absolutely do, it's invaluable to be able to reference old conversations for
wisdom that hasn't made it into documentation.

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jacobwal
Cool. Do you find it easy to locate? I've struggled with their search at
times.

Also, do you end up extracting conversations into docs, or something that's
easier to share with your team?

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jerf
"I've struggled with their search at times."

While you personally may already know this, and this doesn't solve all
problems; be sure to look for and read the tiny little mostly-greyed-out link
to the search syntax for Slack: [https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/202528808-Search-in...](https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/202528808-Search-in-Slack-) , in particular the "Use search
modifiers" section. Slack defaults to a nearly-useless search if you don't
feed it things like a channel limitation or something.

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jacobwal
Great point, I don't use these nearly enough. Thanks!

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abalone
tl;dr it talks exclusively about the benefits of ambient awareness and
_nothing_ of the cost. No discussion whatsoever of the distraction tax of
listening in on all those cross-department threads.

Turns out one of the authors is a paid consultant who has a vested interest in
pumping corporate social tools.[1]

[1] “Paul Leonardo is the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at UC
Santa Barbara and consults with companies about how to use social media and
other technologies more effectively.”

