Slack is our communication platform. It’s the instant-message platform used by gaiia’s team members to communicate with individuals and groups that complements email, and meetings. ****We use is as a chat to connect between people, teams, departments, and as a company. We share news, we give important information, we work on projects, and we connect with each other on a daily basis. Some external partners also have access to custom Slack channels as well.
We encourage all folks to look around! Click on all the things. Slack is extremely versatile, from apps/plugins, recurring reminders, polls, etc.—there is a lot to explore.
You may have used Slack before in other organizations. Please review this guideline to familiarize yourself with how gaiia currently leverage Slack, and to make sure we have effective communication throughout the company.
In summary, Slack does not necessarily replace emails, phone conversations, videoconference, or in-person meetings etc., but is a powerful everyday tool we can use to communicate with other team members. If you have any ideas, thoughts, or suggestions on how we can better leverage Slack, please tell everyone!!!!! 🤙🏼
In addition to sending Direct Messages to one or more people, Slack offers the ability to create private or public channels, sometimes created to share information to everyone or to smaller teams working on different projects.
Participation in a channel is oftentimes optional, while some are required in order to collaborate with your team. If you find that the information in a channel does not impact you, you may opt to either leave or mute the channel.
In an effort to keep a comprehensive workspace, channel creation should be limited to a maximum. If you are not sure if a channel is needed or not, feel free to poke the ‣ channel
Sometimes, you need to notify a person or team directly to request input or notify them of an item of importance.
You can do this by typing @ in front of their name or group name, which will send a notification to them.
In Slack, user groups allow us to notify a whole team at once. Since we are a company of highly-focussed individuals, tagging a team should be done with consideration.
You might not see it that way, but tagging a team multiple time per-day for matters that do not require their full attention can be frustrating to them.
When tagging groups, heed these recommendations:
Make sure you tag the right team
→ For dev squads, look at ‣
→ For an overview of all our current user group, check the group tab in Slack
Make sure you tag them for something that requires their attention
→ If you can wait, prefer posting in their public channel instead. The name of the public channel should be almost identical to their squad name
If you need to tag a dev squad, respect their Focus Time, set between 9h and 11h AM EST, and wait before sending your message
→ If you don’t want to forget sending your message at 11h, you can use the [Schedule for later](https://slack.com/help/articles/201457107-Send-and-read-messages#:~:text=Send or schedule messages,-You can send&text=and select Message.-,Click the message field.,to schedule it for later.) feature
@here audibly notifies only active (meaning online) members of the channel and is used for urgent/time-sensitive items.
@channel audibly notifies everybody in the channel, regardless if they are currently active/online or not (except when notifications are paused.) It’s used to communicate both important and urgent items that require all-hands-on-deck. Information shared via #general can be good examples of messages that require @channel.
<aside> <img src="/icons/warning_yellow.svg" alt="/icons/warning_yellow.svg" width="40px" /> With great power comes great responsibility. Please use @here and @channel with care
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Threads are a way to keep responses to a specific post. A thread is a post, with messages nested inside.
You can choose to respond directly to the post via a thread—we highly recommend using threads.