The Secret to Better Slacking Is a Feature That Everyone Hates

Slack, the workplace chat app that dominates office culture at hundreds of thousands of organizations, embodies Atari founder Nolan Bushnell’s famous principle of game design: easy to learn, hard to master. That’s fitting, since it was originally built as part of a game called Glitch.

But if Slack is a game, it isn’t the kind that an individual can win. It’s fundamentally collaborative, and success is defined by group objectives like productive communication, respectful interactions, and the collective construction of an online office culture that people want to be a part of. You can “win the internet” with a viral joke or stunt, but you can’t win Slack by piling up killer ideas or one-liners. If anything, dominating the conversation is a way to lose Slack: It can intimidate, alienate, or just plain annoy your colleagues. Slack is won, if at all, by an accumulation of good ideas, helpful comments, polite practices, and small kindnesses — and, sure, good-natured wisecracks, if that’s your thing.

A central problem of Slack, then, is how to balance the goals of free-flowing ideas and a casual atmosphere with the goals of respect, inclusion, and, you know, getting some actual work done. Fortunately, there are some tips for how to do this that are relatively uncontroversial, along with one that is highly controversial, at least in the workplaces I’ve been a part of.

Slack is won, if at all, by an accumulation of good ideas, helpful comments, polite practices, and small kindnesses.

First, the less controversial tips.

Know yourself

If you’re inclined toward verbosity, take a second before each Slack to ask yourself whether you’re the person best positioned to make the point you want to make. If not, consider holding back at least briefly and creating the space for someone else to jump in. This is especially important for men, who research shows are on average more inclined to speak their mind in public channels, which can reinforce gender imbalances in the workplace.

On the other hand, if you’re naturally Slack-shy, keep in mind that Slack is meant to be casual, after all. You don’t have to be the world’s expert on a given topic to have a point worth contributing. And when you are the expert, you might try thinking of it as a sort of duty to weigh in, lest the conversation be carried by someone who doesn’t really know what they’re talking about.

Use emoji reactions

Acknowledging your coworkers when they do speak up — particularly the ones who do so less often — is another easy call. That doesn’t have to mean chiming in yourself: A simple emoji reaction can help the speaker feel heard and understood without cluttering the conversation.

Read the room

If there’s a spirited debate about an important or timely topic, that’s probably not the time for you to drop in a link to an unrelated funny tweet you just ran across. Similarly, if someone has just shared a moving personal anecdote, maybe resist the urge to nitpick a peripheral point, or make a play on words. Winning an argument is rarely worth the price of undermining a colleague or making them feel small.

Now for the one that nobody wants to hear.

Use threads

In 2017, Slack introduced threaded messaging, which allows you to reply to any message with a nested sub-conversation, rather than with a new message of your own. You can probably get a good sense of how well this went over by entering “slack threads” in a Google search bar, which will helpfully suggest, “slack threads are terrible.” But Slack threads are not terrible. They’re underrated partly because they’re underutilized. When used with some consistency, they are the perfect tool for balancing the competing values of free-flowing conversation and productivity.

The basic concept should be familiar to anyone who has used Reddit, Twitter, or even Facebook, each of which has a slightly different implementation. Slack’s is slightly different still: Rather than appearing directly below the original message, threaded replies are confined to a sidebar, which appears only when you click or tap to view them. Only if a user checks an extra box will their reply also appear in the channel’s primary feed.

The downsides of that approach are readily apparent to anyone who participates in a busy Slack group. The most glaring is readability. Skimming a channel at a glance, as one does when trying to catch up on what they’ve missed, means overlooking the content of the threads. If you’re a completist, you’ll have to click into each thread one by one to read the replies, which can feel like a waste of time. And if you aren’t a completist, you risk missing important discussions.

The solution to that problem, however, is not to shun threads. It’s to make sure everyone in the channel has a basic grasp of when to use threads and when not to. The problem lies not in the feature itself, but the inconsistency with which it’s used.

As a general guide, threads are a good place for messages that aren’t essential to the conversation taking place in the main channel. They’re also good for messages that call back to something that was said earlier in the channel, but which may have been pushed off the page by a new topic. If there’s a message that fits into a thread, thematically, but contains information that’s important for others to see, that’s the time to check the box that also sends it to the main channel. Otherwise, don’t.

Threading allows users to indulge in digressions, jokes, and in-depth discussions on niche topics, without grabbing the main channel’s mic like Kanye at the VMAs.

As long as everyone in a channel understands this, threads actually improve readability, rather than detracting from it. Anyone trying to catch up on the channel quickly can safely skip them, and take in the important messages much more readily. Those interested in a given thread’s topic can dive in.

A virtue of threading, used thusly, is that it allows users to indulge in digressions, jokes, and in-depth discussions on niche topics, without grabbing the main channel’s mic like Kanye at the VMAs. That should hold appeal for both the over-Slackers and the Slack-shy. For the voluble, threads are a place to speak freely without pushing other people’s important messages off the screen. There’s a modesty about putting your pun, hot take, or personal anecdote in a thread: It signals that you recognize not everyone needs to hear it. For the reticent, threads can feel like a safer space to chime in than the main channel.

Again, the challenge is consistency. If only the team’s politest members use threads, they risk being drowned out by the ones who post every thought in the main channel. Worse, if some members start threading while others ignore the thread, the conversation gets fractured. It’s a collective action problem.

In certain channels — ones where ideas are either accepted or rejected — it may make sense to require all conversations to be threaded. You can take in two days’ worth of decisions in a single screen, and the back-and-forth that went into each decision is only a click away.

That said, there are plenty of Slack channels in which a little entropy is part of the point. If they’re small and private, there may be no need for threads at all. The participants treat them more like a group chat than an official workplace forum, and keeping it casual is more important than keeping it shipshape.

It’s the larger, more active channels — especially those that include company higher-ups — where threading becomes important. Iron-fist enforcement probably isn’t the right approach. But managers or moderators of the channel can at least make sure everyone understands the guidelines, and drop in a gentle reminder when a given conversation might be best-suited to a thread (or a private group or direct message). Conversely, they can amplify a thread by sending a message to the whole channel (a box you can check when composing in a thread), to make sure people don’t miss it.

The good news is, once enough members of a channel start threading, others tend to take the cue. A well-threaded Slack channel — at once readable and inviting, structured and freewheeling — takes some effort to maintain, but the outcome rewards the effort. It’s what winning Slack looks like.