Slack Best Practices - 10 Slack Tips & Tricks for Productivity

Slack best practices to help your team be more productive and stay focused

Slack best practices #1: Be strategic about what channels to create 

Channels are how you bring order to team communication: create them for functions, projects and topics so conversations stay organized in the way that suits your team.

For more on what channels to create, how to name them and which rules to set, see our post 10 Tips on How to Organize Slack Channels.

Slack best practices #2: Default to public channels for transparency

One of the rules that we have at Kipwise when using Slack is default to public channels and avoid using direct messages. This helps to keep relevant teammates on the same page and keep updated on the progress on different tasks.

This also prevents background info from getting lost between interdependent tasks. For example, if a lot of information is sent through direct or private messages, the teammates on Task B might be unaware of some important background info from Task A.

With this practice of defaulting to public channels, you might worry if there will be too many messages to keep up with. That makes best practice #1 even more important. By grouping conversations using appropriate channels, teammates can then focus on channels that are important to them. To avoid too many distractions, teammates can also set up their own notification preferences and mute channels that they sparingly use.

Public by default also keeps Slack’s search useful. On plans with AI search answers, AI responses only include information available to the person asking, which means public channels plus the private channels and DMs they belong to. A decision made in a DM stays invisible to everyone outside it, however good their search is.

Slack best practices #3: Use naming conventions to keep your Slack channels organized

Share a naming convention for channels too, so they stay easy to scan.

For example,

• #company- as a prefix for channels that all teammates should pay attention to (#company-announcements, #company-competitors)
• #team- as a prefix for channels created for each internal functional team (#team-engineering, #team-product, #team-marketing)
• Use the team prefix to group channels related to the same functional team (#cs-tickets, #cs-churnalerts)
• #proj- as a prefix to group projects for a cross-team squad (#proj-affiliate-program, #proj-website-redesign)
• #fun- as a prefix to group channels for social purposes (#fun-sports, #fun-foodie, #fun-music) 
  

To help your teammates follow the convention, create channel prefix guidelines in your workspace settings: the prefixes appear as a dropdown when anyone creates a new channel.

To set up your channel prefix guidelines: 

1. Click Admin in the sidebar
2. Hover over Edit workspace, then click Channel prefixes
3. Click Add Prefix, enter a prefix and a description of how members should use it, and click Save

On Enterprise plans, click your workspace name, then Tools & settings > Customize > Channel Prefixes. Only Workspace Owners and Admins can set prefixes.

Slack best practices #4: Use the channel description to state purposes clearly

Add a clear description when you create a channel.

State what should and shouldn’t be shared in the channel, so teammates use the right channel for their communication.

Slack best practices #5: Set default channels that new members will be added to automatically 

To make sure everyone joins the channels they should pay attention to, set default channels that all new members are added to automatically when they join your Slack team.

To help them find the channels relevant to their functional teams, share a doc that lists all the important channels with their purpose, and pin it to the #company master channel so everyone can refer to it.

Slack best practices #6: Use threads to nest messages to keep conversations easy to follow

Teach and remind teammates to use reply threads instead of starting a new message each time, so a conversation stays in one place. Without threads, other topics jump in and it becomes hard to tell which replies belong to which discussion.

Slack best practices #7: Use @channel wisely to reduce distraction

@channel notifies every teammate in the channel, while @here notifies only the teammates who are online at that moment.

Unless you are sharing an important announcement or an urgent matter that needs everyone’s attention, avoid @channel to keep distraction down.

When you need whoever holds a role, not a named person, mention a user group instead. Create one per duty, such as @support-on-call, and swap its members when the rota changes: the mention reaches whoever is on duty now, nobody on leave gets pinged, and the sender does not have to look up who owns it. User groups are a paid-plan feature, and by default only Workspace Owners and Admins can create them.

Slack best practices #8: Use status and profile to communicate availability

For bigger teams or remote teams, sometimes it’s hard to remember who is on vacation and the working hours for teammates that are based in different time zones. 

As a best practice, when you are on vacation, set your status to let your teammates know that you might not be available to respond to their messages. Your Slack profile is also a good place to communicate information like timezone and normal working hours.

Slack best practices #9: Don’t be reluctant to jump on calls - The 5-min rule

Chat is good for quick updates, but a call is often better for complex issues. Slack has huddles built in, so you can start an audio or video call with a teammate without leaving the conversation. A huddle on the free plan is limited to two people; paid plans allow up to 50.

As a golden rule at Kipwise: jump on a call instead if you find yourself typing on Slack for more than 5 minutes on the same issue! In a video call, you can use functions like screen sharing, making it much more efficient to solve complex issues.

Calls leave no searchable history like Slack messages do, so post a quick summary in the channel afterwards: it keeps everyone on the same page and makes the decision easy to find by search later. On paid plans, AI huddle notes can capture takeaways and action items in a canvas, but someone has to turn them on and they do not work in huddles with external people or guests, so check them before you rely on them.

Slack best practices #10: Use Slack apps to automate workflows

The Slack Marketplace (formerly the App Directory) lists more than 2,000 apps that connect your Slack workspace with the tools that your team uses every day. For examples, some of the Slack integrations that we are using at Kipwise include: 

1. Kipwise 

Of course we are using our tool ourselves as well. Using Kipwise, you can build up a team wiki that integrates with Slack to help teammates access important team knowledge easily, directly in Slack.

• Handy slash commands to create and search for team knowledge directly in Slack
• Slack message shortcuts to easily save a message to Kipwise or quickly answer teammates’ questions with content on Kipwise
  

Other than our powerful integration, we also offer many other features to help you enable better knowledge flow in your team: 

• Real-time collaborative editor - With rich embedding options, your team can edit the same doc at the same time and create visually appealing documentation easily. 
• Content review process - Set designated reviewers for your collections to ensure content is always up-to-date and accurate. 
• Unified search - connect Kipwise with other tools like Google Drive and OneDrive and you can search through all the connected tools with one single search. 

2. Trello

Trello is a Kanban-style list-making application and we at Kipwise are using Trello as our task management tool. With the Trello Slack integration, we receive updates directly in Slack whenever there is new activity on our Trello boards and cards, so we don’t have to monitor so many tools for updates.

3. Figma 

We at Kipwise are using Figma as our design tool. Because Figma is browser-based, your team can collaborate in real time, just like in Google Docs, and its in-app commenting suits design review feedback.

With its Slack integration, we can track progresses and updates directly in Slack. 

4. Intercom 

We are using Intercom as our customer support platform. Using Intercom, you can talk to your leads and customers almost anywhere: on your website, directly in your app, on mobile and via email. Some of our favorite features include event triggered emails, in-app messages product tour and drip campaigns.

With its Slack integration, we can set a designated channel that will receive notifications whenever there are new customer tickets and replies. This saves us from monitoring multiple tools, and it lets teammates who are not on the customer support team (and might not check Intercom at all) see the types of questions our customers usually ask.

For more Slack apps, see our posts 14 Best Slack Apps for Productivity and 18 Best Slack Apps for Remote Teams Collaboration.