Help your team avoid distractions on Slack: Our best practices

Madina Baikulova

9 mins read

Table of Contents

Do you ever wake up to such a mountain of Slack notifications that you feel overwhelmed before your day’s even started?

You’re not alone. More than 12 million people use Slack every day, and we’re willing to bet that a good portion of them have experienced Slack burnout at one time or another.

That’s not to say that Slack isn’t a useful tool — or even an enjoyable one. 85%* of Slack users love using the platform, and for good reason. It’s a hugely convenient way to keep in touch with colleagues from a distance, and it’s one of the most popular instant communication tools out there.

But here’s the thing: Slack can also be a big productivity suck. Constantly pinging channels are hugely distracting, and — as you’ll know if you’ve ever taken a few days off without checking Slack — notifications can build up at an incredible rate. Plus, since it’s such a busy platform, important messages can easily get lost in the noise.

The fact is that Slack is an instant communications channel, designed for quick discussions and water cooler chat — and it’s really not suitable for business-critical updates or long-form content.

If you want a well-rounded comms solution, you’ll need to add a tool that can work alongside Slack, helping you to manage your announcements, news, and updates while bringing Slack back to its true purpose: instant communications.

In this article, we’ll share our tips for managers and leaders to help their teams to get the most out of Slack, without it becoming a productivity killer.

First things first: Slack isn't for everything

Slack can be a noisy place. And a big reason for that is that it’s often overused: many companies use Slack for all of their communications — which can quickly get overwhelming.

To take back control of communications in your organization, you need to separate out your rapid, dynamic, and static communications. Slack is an excellent solution for rapid communications: the whole point of the platform is to enable employees to quickly ping a message across to a colleague in the same way they might have popped over to their desk pre-2020.

“Slack is perfect for short-form communications,” says Frank van de Koppel, Strategy Director at rethink.

“This means that it’s also important to have a space where employees can store and find longer-form content — without spamming everyone with notifications or having to search through months of messages.

A company intranet can help you to reduce messages on Slack and bring together disparate sources of information so employees always know where to look for long-form, long-lifespan content like budget reports, marketing plans, or office policy documents.

You can also use your intranet to share dynamic, mid-lifespan communications: those that don’t need to last forever but don’t belong on Slack either — like internal news or blog posts, or company-wide messages from your senior leadership team. These might be broadcast to the whole company, or to a group of employees within the organization.

With that clutter cleared, you can get back to using Slack for what it was designed for: rapid, short-lifespan messaging that’s relevant in the moment, but doesn’t need to be referred back to down the line.

Plus, certain intranet solutions (like Happeo) even integrate with Slack — so you can use them together for a seamless rapid, dynamic, and static communications experience.

5 tips to help your employees improve their Slack habits

A lot of Slack’s problems come down to the way it’s used or configured — and a few quick tweaks can transform how you and your team experience the platform.

1. Aggressively leave channels you don't need to be in

Large organizations tend to have a lot of channels, for everything from specific teams to defunct projects to photos of employees’ pets. And over time, most of us end up in more channels than we could possibly keep up with.

2. Always use threads (and unsubscribe when they get distracting)

Employees are often bombarded with Slack messages and notifications that aren’t relevant to them. To resolve this, always reply to messages in threads. This way, you’ll only send notifications to the people who have commented on the thread, leaving everyone else to get on with their work.

3. Tweak settings to manage your notifications

Slack notifications can completely derail your focused work time, so it’s important to set them up so you only see the ones you need. When choosing what actions you’d like to be notified about on Slack, you have three options:

All new messages
Direct messages, mentions, and keywords
Nothing As a minimum, we’d recommend choosing the second option so you’re only notified when something’s actually relevant to you.

4. Use the save function for actionable and important items

Slack has a lot of features that many users aren’t aware of. For example, did you know that you can easily save a message to return to later if you don’t have time to respond? To do this, simply hover over a message and click the save icon.

5. Leverage your Slack status

Most jobs require you to really get your head down and focus once in a while — and Slack is one of the biggest culprits for interrupting deep work. Leveraging your status to let colleagues know you’re away from Slack can be a game changer here.

Set up some basic Slack usage guidelines with your team

If you want to help your team minimize distractions on Slack, it’s a good idea to work with them to put together some basic policies for using the platform. Some of this is simply about encouraging everyone to implement the tips above.

1. Periodically close inactive Channels

For this reason, it’s a good idea to set a policy for when channels will be deleted — such as after six months of inactivity.

2. Set up clear guidelines for emoji reactions

It’s a good idea to make sure everyone’s on the same page by clarifying what certain reactions actually mean.

3. Encourage everyone to set office hours

To help your employees switch off and avoid burnout, you should encourage them to turn off their notifications outside of their office hours — or even make this a company policy.

4. Have everyone clear notifications after time away

We suggest implementing a simple policy wherein everyone agrees to clear all of their notifications when they get back from time off.

5. Agree on what goes on Slack (and what doesn't)

Ensuring employees know what content they should use Slack for helps to keep the platform free of noise and avoid bombarding everyone with notifications.

Solve information chaos with Happeo + Slack

Slack can be a valuable tool for an organization, but it needs to be used properly. If not, it can easily become a distraction, suck away at your team’s productivity, and pressure them into working when they’re not on the clock.

You need to make sure you have a complete comms toolkit that includes a space for instant messaging (Slack), and a dedicated platform for important company-wide announcements and static information that might otherwise get lost.