What Slack Analytics Say About Your Company
Slack Analytics are a powerful tool for understanding the way your company communicates. How and where your team chats is a pillar of your overall team communication structure. Conway’s Law states the following:
Your product will reflect the positives and negatives of how your company communicates. In this article, you’ll learn how to analyze the single most critical Slack metric and take action to improve how your company communicates.
Asynchronous Communication
Before analyzing Slack trends, we need to understand where Slack fits into the modern communication ecosystem.
In my experience building Software as a Service (SaaS) products, Slack is one of three main async communication platforms:
Slack: Messaging
Jira: Work tracking
Email: A relic of days gone past
In contrast, meetings and calls are the primary forms of synchronous communication. Synchronous meeting time is harder to coordinate in remote working environments. Asynchronously is now the way to communicate. Use meetings for daily standups (to unblock team members), like discussions on topics, not day-to-day work tracking.
Returning to the three platforms above, Jira (and other ticket tracking software) excels at tracking everything related to a single work item: source code commits, comments, epic links, or current status. Jira works for tickets, but what about everything else? There are other valuable topics to discuss: quick questions, real-time discussions about tickets, conversations about tickets that don’t exist yet, peer-to-peer help. This is the work in-between planned work. This work is the glue that holds your organization together.
Where Messages are Sent
The Slack Analytics Dashboard has plenty to explore, but we’ll focus on the Channel and Message analytics. One word of caution: do not equate member messages with productivity. This article will look only at channel and message trends, not at individuals.
Take a moment and go to your Slack Analytics dashboard. Scroll down to Public and private, then select Where messages are sent.
Consider these metrics. Are most messages sent in channels, or direct messages? Before you read further, think about where you send your messages. Does this chart match your expectations? Let’s discuss why each of these mediums is important.
Just-In-Time Information
Channels are critical in Slack. Channels, particularly public channels, live on well past projects end or individuals leave. Channels are the shared knowledge of your company in searchable form. Most importantly, anyone in your Slack workspace-even future employees-can search through and read public channels. Searchability is the core reason public channels are where the work needs to happen. Let’s look at an example.
Imagine you work for a software company. Features will typically flow through the following process:
A customer requests a feature or describes a need
Sales or Product Management recognize this need and prioritize it against other features
Product Management and engineering leaders architect the feature, make design decisions, and size the feature
Engineering leadership communicates the feature to their teams and works to implement it
Engineering ships the feature, and product management notifies the customer
This process may sound familiar and straightforward. One key aspect I didn’t describe is how long this process can take. A month or two could pass at any point in the process above as the company reprioritizes a feature or urgent bugs arise.
Think of how many different people and departments are involved during the above process. Context on a customer’s challenge, an engineering detail, or upcoming architectural changes is essential for all team members, but not right now.
Just-in-Time information is making the correct context available to the PM, engineer, or support representative when they need it. The magic of Slack is that messages are retained forever (or as long as you pay for the service). Others can read up on the reasons a decision was made or why a technical complexity was ignored for the moment. Discussing problems and sharing decisions publicly saves you from inviting too many people to meetings they shouldn’t attend.
Direct Messages are still an essential tool. Sensitive conversations and occasional consensus-building are best done in private. Remember to post a summary of any decisions you make in a public channel afterward.
You and your team should discuss all work in public channels. Look back at your Slack workspace’s message breakdown. Are you messaging about work in the right place?
Target to have 60%-80% of all messages sent in public channels, though each organization is different. Make it a goal to increase your public channel message percentage.
How to Improve Your Team’s Communication
Now that we’ve discussed the importance of communicating in public channels, let’s look at some practical ways you can improve.
Add Slack Links to Jira
The first tip is easy: add a link to the Slack thread into the Jira ticket when discussing a Jira ticket in Slack (in a public channel, of course). Jira comments are sometimes too slow to chat through a quick thought. That’s all right. Slack is fantastic for near-real-time communication, and you shouldn’t force all conversations into Jira. A link to Slack means future Jira ticket readers have all relevant context at their disposal.
Use Slack Threads
Moving all work conversations to public channels can overwhelm team members with too many messages. Using threads means all messages in the discussion are still public but don’t bombard others with notifications. Tagging a few people in your first message and mentioning that you’re starting a threaded conversation lets others know they can join if they’re interested.
Document All Decisions in Team Channels
Slack has excellent documentation on naming channels well. Top-level team channels are good for announcements and celebrating team achievements. Temporary project or one-off topic channels work well for smaller groups to discuss more specific topics. Though these smaller discussions shouldn’t involve everyone, the results may. Publish a summary message in a team channel with a link to the temporary channel describing the group’s final decision. Anyone interested in the details of how you came to that decision can read up on the entire discussion, but you have not forced them to read it.
Conclusion
The key to successful team communication is making information available to everyone but not forcing it on them. Strategically using public Slack channels is a great way to share information with everyone, but that doesn’t mean everyone will use it. At its core, your organization’s culture defines the way it communicates. Regularly analyzing where your team’s Slack messages are sent can help you understand if you’re moving in the right direction.
If you’re interested in learning more about this article, please send me a note at brian@connsulting.io or schedule a time to chat at https://calendly.com/connsulting.