Every team I’ve been on lately has communicated through Slack. And I mean every team—even the client teams who otherwise run an entirely corporate IT stack. Slack is the place where people hash things out, right up until they jump on a Zoom meeting.
Slack is also the place where valuable information goes to vanish into a massive black hole. This information drains away because people drift toward conversing in direct messages.
What happens when you converse in public?
Conversing in public is like having a conversation in an office like Atomic’s. Other people, both on teams and off, may overhear. When they overhear, they have the opportunity to both learn from a conversation and contribute.
Systems like Slack also give a key advantage to public conversations: they become searchable. In practice, this often means that people who come by later can find out what happened in the past with some part of their work, and make smarter decisions about what they’re doing today.
Here’s why people go private.
Fixing this problem isn’t as simple as just laying down a rule that everyone must discuss everything publicly. Understanding why people go private is key.
The simplest reason conversations slip into DMs is that people simply tend to think of their conversations as one-on-one affairs, not realizing the value of holding them where more people can see them. But there are other reasons that people might prefer to go private.
More troubling is when people take conversations to other channels because they don’t feel it’s safe to hold them publicly. That’s generally not their problem. That’s others around them creating that problem, by not making it safe.
Make it safe for public discussions.
Emotional intelligence is one of the key skills for everyone who participates in not just Slack, but any tool where conversation is a feature. Simply thinking before you speak goes a long way.
But there are also many other things you can do—and even leverage some private conversations to do it:
- Take the time to really understand something before replying. This is especially important as tools are increasingly rolling out LLM-driven summaries—which, in my experience, have poor track records at getting folks’ meaning precisely right. Go to the source—directly if necessary—to make sure your understanding is complete.
- Think about the importance of your reply before you make it. Does this conversation need to have you involved? Will the impact be serious if you aren’t? Consider: could the way it unfolds lead to something great if you let it go?
- When someone comes up with a great idea, make sure they know you think so. When you share that idea more broadly, be sure to give them credit.
- Understand that everyone has different experiences that may lead them to interact with others differently. Make space for that.
- Assume good intent. In my experience, most people working on teams want to do good work. Assume they’re trying their best. Be kind with feedback, which more likely should be a one-on-one conversation.
Proritizing emotional intelligence will go a long way, and can often lead you to leverage the skills above.
Sometimes, you have to go private.
Some situations do call for a private conversation. When they do, and if you have consent, try to surface public learnings from private conversations afterward—either on your own or by encouraging others. This way, others can learn from them too.
Conference-call conversations, like on Zoom, are also something that are intrinsically private to the parties involved. Encourage people to share out their learnings from these conversations more broadly. Videos, transcripts, and sometimes summaries (watching out for accuracy!) can be helpful, but not as helpful as real people sharing what they found important from a conversation.
When you make it safe to have conversations in public, share why you think everyone can benefit from public discussion, and—this is key—demonstrate your commitment to everyone you work with, you can encourage a better culture where they’re all more informed. For today—and for tomorrow.