A guide for rolling out slack and onboarding people in a large (many hundreds of people) organisation. You should be able to replace <organisation> with your own team name and you'll have a good starting point.
Joining slack is up to you. Membership is open to everyone in the organisation. You just need to visit
<organisation>.slack.com
and sign in using your <organisation> email address.
If you are not part of <organisation> then you will need to contact the <organisation> slack administrators to get access. You'll get a restricted account which doesn't have quite the same privileges as normal users but still allows you to collaborate with members of <organisation>.
Your Slack profile is very important, as it is the main method people will use to find out who you are and what you do. Please fill in all fields as well as a profile photo of you (not an avatar). This is important as many people will never have met you but you will be interacting closely with them. A real photo can really help. Slack has a guide on how to edit your profile.
In Slack you can alert individual users with @username or @channel to notify everyone in the channel (or @here for just those people online). If you belong to a channel that has a lot of members / content (e.g. #general) @channel notifications might be something you don't want to see. Slack allows per channel customisation of this.
When you no longer work for <organisation> your account will be deactivated by the <organisation> slack admin team as part of the normal joiners and leavers process.
Slack's Team Directory (availble from the menu) can be incredibly valuable for finding people in a large, distributed organisation. If you have filled in your profile fully then others will be able to find you. You never know when someone will need to find you!
Slack allows for public channels which anyone who is a member of the <organisation> slack can find and private channels which you need to be invited to join. By default, every slack joiner becomes a member of #general and #random. Members can not leave the #general channel (but they can silence notifications). #general will have many hundreds of members. It is useful to remember this before messaging. Is your query or announcement better served by a more specific channel or do you really need to message all slack members? #random is also joined by default but you can leave. #random has no rules and is akin to a watercooler for all of <organisation>.
<organisation>'s slack channel strategy can be described as “teams, communities, locations, and events”. By team we mean the small group of people that you work with everyday (not the slack 'team). The channel streategy includes:
- Each team is encouraged to maintain a public channel (if you are the team lead please consider setting this up)
- Each team may create multiple private channels for differnt purposes
- Each community of practice has a public channel (community leads please go ahead and create these)
- Each location has a public channel
- Each event has a short-lived public channel Slack has a guide on how to create a channel. There are going to be a lot of channels. Channels can be really useful for targetted public conversations. To keep channels discovereable your new channel should be named according to the conventions described below.
Each team may wish to create a public channel. This enables others to find a team and talk with them about business challenges, technical problems, or other issues, etc. A public team channel should be named #team- for ease of discovery.
Teams will probably also want to create private channels for internal discussions. Sometimes, depending on the size of the team you may want to have multiples of these, perhaps for subsets of the team or for specific integrations (like source code repository notifications for nstance). Priavet channels can be named whatever you like (as they are not discoverable) though they often follow the same conventions as public channels, perhaps prefixed with int.
People interested in a community of practice are encouraged to join or create a public channel. This will enable like-minded people to discuss issues in their community of practice. By making it public others can join or observe, often learning about things that they are not normally exposed to. A public community of practice channel should be named #community-.
People working within <organisation> at a specific location can benefit from being a member of their own channel. Think of it as a subset of #general. Locations managers or members are encouraged to maintain a public channel and use it for discussion and announcement. This will enable people to stay up-to-date with location-specific issues. Public location channels should be named #-.
A bit of a catch-all, #event- is used for temporal issues or discussions that don't merit an ongoing #community discussion. They may last only a few hours (maybe a live incidnet) or months (planning for an upcoming office move).