Overview

Slack is the industry leader in business communication. It combines elements of email and traditional chat apps with third party integrations to become your main “Hub” for work.

All communication, including in Slack, should follow the principles laid out in our ‣.

We try to use email as little as possible and use Slack for all ongoing regular communication.

Use For...

✅ Internal company communication outside of a project.

✅ Project communication that does not need to be a part of “the record” or visible to future participants in the project

✅ Daily client communication when the client is a Slack organization

✅ Communication with vendors, freelancers, partners, etc.

Don’t Use For...

⛔️ Sharing long documents (Use Notion or Google Docs)

⛔️ Emergency communication (Use texting/phone calls)

⛔️ Keeping track of task statuses (Use Asana)

Why we use it

In a business context there is always a tension between having an “all in one” toolkit and having lots of separate tools which are all tailor-made to be ideal for specific things. We have chosen the route of using lots of different tools. Slack is key in that it integrates with most of those tools, and replaces email as a primary communication channel, so Slack is the “heart” of your Cantilever work day.

How we use it

We have an asynchronous communication style at Cantilever, so we have specific recommendations about how to use Slack that may be different from other teams. Slack's native settings encourage a "ping-heavy" user experience, which is not in line with our recommended communication or effective work style.

Ryan’s Walkthrough Video

https://www.loom.com/share/9ee2eb201f1747ed82f17c644b83ffa0

Golden Rules

• Do not have notifications on in Slack except for specific client channels you might want to keep an eye on
• Go through all your Slack messages/threads once every 24 hours at a minimum, when you are not focusing on something else
• Add as many integrations as possible to your Slack so you can see updates from multiple services in a single location

Slack Guidelines

Response Time Expectations

Our policy is that each team member should reply to messages in any platform we work in within 24 business hours. You are encouraged to check Slack more frequently (between tasks within the work day) but not to have it open all the time and be constantly on top of every new message.

Statuses

Statuses in Slack are useful for people to know what is going on with you during the day and whether they are likely to reach you quickly if they try.

Pro tip: the "Clear after..." setting has some default values, but you can also change these.