How to be a good citizen of Slack

After Slack 101 and 102, our final installment of the Slack onboarding series is about one of the most difficult aspects of adding people to your team: growing and maintaining your culture.

Putting things out there

Slack is designed to add transparency to an organization, so it’s best to default to communication in public channels whenever possible. Slack’s own team sends tens of thousands of messages each week — in a recent summary, 70% of those were posted in public channels, with 28% occurring in private channels and just 2% in direct messages. Posting messages in public channels means anyone in the organization can see what various teams are working on, see how much progress people are making on projects, and search the archive for context they need.

Minimized disruptions

It’s tempting to make sure no one misses your very important message, but it’s courteous to refrain from notifying large groups of people if it’s not truly necessary. We use @everyone, @channel, and @here alerts, but rarely, because doing so sends a notification to a whole bunch of people who might not need it.

In the past year and a half, I’ve only seen an@everyone message pushed out twice during emergencies. Even though I follow hundreds of channels, @channel is only used a few times per month for important announcements. Slightly more common is @here, which only pings members of a channel who are logged in. Pare it down even more with user groups: if I just need the people I work with directly to see a message, I alert @editorial-team and spare the rest of the channel.

Time and boundaries

It’s a good idea to check the number of members in a channel, as well as the purpose in the channel info pane whenever you’re going to ask a question or post a general comment — you want to make sure you’re doing it in the right place. If it’s your own team of, say, eight people, an off-topic message won’t be as big of an issue as if you’re in a large channel with hundreds of members.

We ask everyone in busy channels to search before you ask. It’s another way to be respectful of everyone’s time. Spend a few minutes searching related channels for keywords around your specific problem, and chances are you might find your answer, or at least you’ll be aware of previous discussions you can reference.

The posting patterns of most teams at Slack vary throughout the day. In my own immediate team, we typically spend the first hour of the day planning, meeting, and sending reminders of project due dates, then our team channel goes mostly quiet until the afternoon. We close up each day by turning in work and getting feedback, but try to give everyone a few hours in the middle of the day to focus on work. It’s not completely silent, and some work requires real-time discussions in Slack for a decision, but our channels are slightly lower traffic between 10am and 4pm.

Every team and company’s workflow will be different, but we’ve found it helpful to be clear about our communication expectations.

For example, one of Slack’s internal mottos is “work hard and go home” and we take it pretty seriously — almost all of us use the Do Not Disturb feature to protect our non-working hours (which may vary for team members working in different roles, across time zones, or with different lifestyles). Our rule of thumb is if you need to send a message outside of the recipient’s normal working hours, there is no expectation of an immediate reply. Generally, this is a good rule to keep, given the recipient of any message might be otherwise occupied — in a meeting, heads down on project work, or eating lunch.

Redirecting

There’s a saying at Slack that “all channels tend towards #random.” We use the term “raccoon” (and an associated custom emoji) to denote when a discussion should take place in another channel. In a busy general channel where someone is asking lots of very specific questions, it’s not uncommon to see a message saying someone should “raccoon their questions to DM” or a specific team instead. It’s not used to shame anyone, but instead to help teach everyone where a better place for the discussion might be. Here’s a good example:

:thumbsup:

Over the past year since emoji reactions launched, we have adopted several ways of using them internally. Our most common use is polling or voting. We regularly ask in channels if everyone prefers option 1 or option 2 by marking each with a reaction, and decisions are quickly made as everyone’s votes get tallied up.

We’ve also introduced a small workflow using reactions. Often someone will make a request and another person will “claim it” by marking it with the eyes emoji to say “I’m going to take a look at this.” Once the question is answered and the task complete, that same person will mark it with a white/green checkmark to let members of the channel know it’s done. If you leave your mentions and reactions activity sidebar open, you’ll know the moment someone completes your request.

We hope these three installments of our onboarding series give you plenty of ideas how to use Slack thoughtfully as well as offer tips on how to train up new employees for your own team.

Slack 103: Communication and culture was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How Jean Wright worked for three decades to land her dream job of sewing for NASA

An audio version of this story can be heard on Episode 2 of Slack’s podcast Work in Progress, a new show about the meaning and identity we find in work.

One summer evening in July of 1969, 13-year-old Jean Wright stepped outside her house and stared up at the night sky. The moon above Flint, Michigan glowed as brightly as ever that night, but Wright looked at it differently. Moments earlier she had watched Neil Armstrong on TV as he took his first historic steps on its barren surface, and suddenly the dark sky brimmed with possibility.

“There’s men up there,” Wright recalls thinking. “Someday, I am going to be out there working for NASA too.”

It was a big dream for a girl from Flint, even though it made perfect sense. Wright grew up passionate about outer space and sewing. After her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Hansford, taught her and her sister how to sew, Wright began making her own clothes. At the same time, she was crazy about the space program and would clip articles about the Apollo missions from the newspaper and send little patches she had designed for the astronauts to Houston. There had to be a way to combine her two loves.

“I knew we had seamstresses that sewed spacesuits and I wanted to get involved in doing something with that,” she says.

It took her more than three decades, but Wright eventually achieved her goal at age 49, when she was hired to work as an Aerospace Composite Tech of Soft Goods, or seamstress, for NASA’s space shuttle program. Wright would go on to work on the Endeavor, Atlantis, and Discovery, hand-sewing thermal protection between the gaps in the shuttle tiles, known as “gap fillers,” which acted as a kind of bumper so the tiles didn’t crack as they vibrated against each other during reentry.

Now retired, Wright looks back on her hard-earned career with pride. One of her favorite things she loves telling her granddaughters is “Grandma has stitches in the Smithsonian.”

The story of how Jean landed her dream job at NASA is an incredible tale of perseverance. Not everyone has the patience and drive to follow a dream for more than three decades, but her story still offers some lessons for the rest of us.

Keep your eyes on the prize

It may be a no-brainer, but the first step towards achieving any dream is to figure out what it is in the first place. Jean set her sights on NASA at an early age. Being an astronaut seemed too far of a stretch, and she knew wanted to be in a creative field and to work with her hands.

Having such a clear idea of what she wanted to do served as a guiding star for Jean over the years that followed, helping her take incremental steps in the right direction.

Location, location, location

Jean got married at 18, and spent the next 22 years raising three children, working as a tailor, and following her husband around the United States for his naval career. When he retired at age 40 and asked where she wanted to move to, she knew just the place.

“I want to move to Florida because I want to work at the Kennedy Space Center, and I’d love to work for NASA,” she told him.

By relocating near NASA, Jean increased her chances of being able to actually work there. While it’s becoming easier in some industries to work from anywhere, there are still hubs for different fields — if you want to be an actress or work in politics, you have a better chance of it happening if you move to Hollywood or DC.

Do your homework

Every occupation has its own particular language, including the space sector. During the years before Wright landed her interview at NASA, she spent hours preparing for it by watching NASA TV. When Jean finally had her interview, she surprised everyone by using the correct terms and phrases. She also spent time studying the fabrics and threads that NASA used.

“I would go on the computer and study everything I could about thermal protection on the off chance, if by some miracle, I got a chance to work there, I wouldn’t sound foolish during my interview,” she says. Her hard work paid off.

Gotta have faith

There’s a lot to be said about the power of positive thinking. Jean kept a reminder of her goal, kind of talisman that kept her going: a lanyard that hung from her bedroom mirror that said “To quilt is love, to finish divine.”

“I would look at it everyday and it would give me inspiration that someday a miracle might happen,” she says. Jean would tell herself when she saw it, “One day you’ll be there, Jean. Don’t worry. Someday it’ll come, it’ll come.”

Seamstress to the (literal) stars was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How to make it work when you work with your spouse

O n their first anniversary as a couple in 2011, Haley and Simone Jude were hiking in grassy hills above a Northern California hot spring, discussing their future, when they had a vision — they should go into business together.

They were in love and had similar passions. As a child of documentary filmmakers, Haley grew up surrounded by filmmaking and had a background in oral history. Simone was a videographer, who had been working on a feature film on the side. It almost seemed logical that they’d start a film company together.

How hard could it be?

The following year, they quit their jobs and founded Moving Portraits, which specializes in documentaries and web video for companies and nonprofits.

As it turns out, when you’re living and working with your significant other and you both describe yourselves as “stubborn, strong-willed, passionate people,” there’s a lot to figure out.

“Like how not to kill each other,” says Haley.

Yet four years later, the Judes’ business and relationship is thriving. They are married, and last year became parents to a baby girl. This is the story of how they’ve made it work.

Divide and conquer

Haley and Simone made their first mistake almost immediately when they set up their desks next to each other in their living room.

Being in such close proximity turned out to be an invitation to distraction. “It was horrible,” recalls Simone. The couple put a stop to this by moving Simone’s desk into the spare bedroom and by using an “Open/Closed” sign to remind each other not bother the other when the sign said “Closed” unless it was an emergency.

Another early problem was what they call “twinning,” or working on the same thing at the same time.

“It’s the kiss of death for a small business,” says Simone.

They wasted a lot of time this way in the early days, arguing over silly things like whether an edit should be moved up a few frames earlier.

They found the solution in a partnership workshop where they learned about the importance of “spheres of influence.” Now they can offer each other their opinions, but one person has the final decision over whatever is in their “sphere.” For Haley, it’s client management, marketing, sales, production and content. Simone gets the final say in editing, post-production, directing and everything that is visual storytelling.

The couple employs the same system at home where Haley orders the groceries, does the meal planning, trip and activity scheduling, cooking, and laundry, and Simone does all the cleaning.

And baby makes three

As the Judes celebrated professional milestones over the years, like landing large projects, they have also celebrated personal ones. The got married in 2013, and their daughter Juniper was born last August.

Juniper’s arrival brought a whole new level of joy and logistics to their relationship.

“We had no idea what it would be like to run a business and have a kid,” says Haley.

These days they take turns working and taking care of the baby. Haley does the early shift, working at the office they rent from 7am to around noon, while Simone hangs out with Juniper. Then they switch and Simone works until about 5 pm, while Haley watches the baby.

Gratitude and priorities

When it comes to advice for others who work with their spouses, the Judes have a few suggestions.

The first is to start a daily gratitude practice during which you take turns sharing three things you’re grateful the other person did that day.

“Usually when you say three things you start thinking of a bunch of other things and it changes the whole dynamic,” says Simone.

They also recommend a good partnership coach to guide you through the inevitable bumpy patches. And above all, before you decide to go into business with your romantic partner, they say it’s crucial to be really clear about which relationship is more important — the business one or the personal one.

“From the very beginning, we were always 100% certain that we wanted our relationship to work and if the business was making our relationship worse, then obviously that would have to go,” says Haley.

Now, they can’t imagine running their business alone.

On sick days and in health was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The what, why, and who cares of how we tweet from SlackHQ

Early brand twitter is a delightful place. Because the first people posting in the company account will likely be the same people who thought to set it up — people so ebullient and excited about talking to the users that their tone is informal, casual, playful. Certainly was the case for us. Still is.

For almost the first year, only a few hands touched the SlackHQ twitter account. The CEO, founders, early employees: the same people running the company and building the product. It was a small team: all hands on deck. And the tone, reflecting the people, was conversational, slightly off-kilter, playful, and informative. Confident, but self-effacing—helpful, but slightly odd.

As we’ve grown, the number of mentions has exploded from a couple dozen to hundreds (sometimes thousands) every day. But we’ve still tried to maintain the same tone, whoever is tweeting. It’s the place that the Slack voice is the most playful, but it’s also high pressure — which makes it a tricky one to scale.

These aren’t suggestions for other companies necessarily to follow, partly because that would be weird, but mainly because every company has its own voice and values. This is just how we do.

The style guide for our main Twitter handle comes in two parts — the one for the few, and the one for the many. There are a lot of people answering individual questions, offering support, and dealing with feedback, but that requires a slightly different tone (and more scalable version) of the voice we use for tweeting out to the world from SlackHQ. In a later section we’ll get to “how we expand that single voice to a much larger support one” — but we couldn’t go there without going here first. So here we are.

Step one: SlackHQ in the planning

What do we tweet?

We need to be clear about what this account is for, so our outbound tweets (that is, posts we initiate that are not responses to questions or comments) fit into one of the following categories.

• Product news
• Tips
• Announcements
• Nonsense
• That’s it.

And all in moderation.

With any of these, we always first ask “is this worth tweeting?” Will this impact enough people to make the broadcast worth it? If not, let’s find a better way.

What you’re doing is important

It’s not important because of who started the account, or who has done it before you. And it’s not important because it’s high-profile. And it’s not important because your words are special.

It’s important because the tweets we put out represent the end point for a lot of people’s work, and the starting point for a lot of others. If it’s a feature announcement, then the work of dozens of product managers, user researchers, designers, developers, QA engineers, product marketing managers, and many others have been part of bringing this thing to the point of release. The work of hundreds of Customer Experience agents, account and sales managers, who will be explaining it to people, will start from the moment it’s released.

You’re shining a light on the work of hundreds of our team, and putting it out into the world — you owe it to them to do a good job of it. Or at least spell everything right.

Step two: SlackHQ in the writing

Content is more important than character

People need to understand exactly what you’re trying to tell them more than they need to be impressed with how you’re saying it. Be clear; be concise. If you’re announcing an updated app or a new feature, use #changelog, so people who don’t care about the rest can search for it.

Emoji are far from mandatory

Never ever replace words with emoji. If you add emoji, they should be funny/celebratory. But they’re not required. Look back at our account to a time when we were using them in every tweet and you’ll see why. It’s painful.

Use words that people know

Avoid puns. I know, I’m British, that’s tantamount to storming the palace and throwing my passport at the Queen, but avoid them. Wordplay is slightly different, but particularly avoid puns that require a particular cultural understanding or educational experience to get. Puns make some people feel smart, and others left out. Let’s not do that.

Use words that give people joy

Explore the thesaurus and dig through the dusty corners of your brain to find the words you’ve squirreled away in there for the winter. Or say something plain and simple but allow the music or meter of the words to make it dance in people’s minds as they read it. You don’t have to shock or annoy or provoke; words that are charming are just as disarming when used in an apposite way.

Don’t take words that don’t belong to you, do not use words that could offend

Cultural appropriation is not a good look on a corporation. Also avoid ableist language, or words that could hurt. We’re not going to use words that are a slur in another dialect or language, so ask around if there is any doubt.

It’s ok to sit and watch the bandwagons pass by

And we won’t join in on whatever the current meme is going around Twitter, whether it’s a reference to a current event, or Talk Like a Pirate Day or anything else. It will age badly and make us look like we’re trying to be cool. We don’t care about cool. Doesn’t mean we’re not. Doesn’t mean we are. Either way, we’re not going out of our way to try and be cool.

In fact, it’s ok to sometimes be way way way behind the curve

Sounding like you’ve just tap-danced off a movie lot in 1934 or been coughed up by the cellar of the British Library can be, if used sparingly, SO fetch.

Do the work

Don’t use the first thing you think of. Write it down somewhere, but then write down every joke you think of after it, look at it sideways, flip it — spend 15 minutes, then ask someone else: writers rooms exist for a reason.

Throw ideas around. Or get people to vote on options. But always have a time limit to brainstorms, a vote limit on the best tweet and a power of veto. You cannot write by committee. There can only be one hand holding the pen when it hits the paper.

We will not take ourselves too seriously

And we do not brag. While we’re always proud of the work we do, let’s keep perspective. We’re just making software. Be self-effacing: think of it as our Canadian side coming through.

We always take people who use Slack seriously

We may take ourselves lightly, but people who use Slack? Those people we take seriously. When we’re putting out a new thing, be light about our part in it, but serious about how it can improve people’s working lives.

It’s why we don’t say, “We’ve been working so hard” in announcements. No one cares. Of course we have. So never mind that: this thing we’re telling people about, what does it do for them?! Put the user at the center of every story: even 140 character stories.

But mainly: Don’t overthink it.

Lol. We know, we just reread everything above. Seriously though, you’ll be fine. It’s only Twitter.

Step three: SlackHQ in the tweeting

Check that it’s an appropriate time to tweet

Before you tweet, check the news and check Twitter to see if there are news events that would make it an inappropriate time to tweet. If there are, hold off. Check with the Customer Experience team to make sure there are no known service problems, that you’re not going to be adding to the support load unnecessarily. This is why we don’t schedule tweets — courtesy to our team, and an understanding that we live in uncertain times.

Take responsibility

“You break it, you pay for it.”

We don’t just fire things into the world and walk off — if you’ve written a tweet that’s confusing people or causing a lot of questions and feedback on twitter, be prepared to step in and deal with it, be around the tweeters channel to provide helpful phrasing, or follow up on Twitter with a clarification.

We have a conversational tone, so be prepared to be conversational

Be involved in the conversation — follow the replies to whatever it is that you’ve tweeted out. If you see people replying to something you tweeted, don’t just reply to them in the channel that feeds all our tweets into Slack. They can’t hear you. Go and say it to them on Twitter.

The serious business of nonsense

SlackHQ isn’t just about announcements and serious news. The real humans building Slack like to talk to the real humans using Slack sometimes. Person to person. Those are important moments too.

So occasionally tweet a word. Or a random collection of words that sound good, or encouraging. Or a question, or an invitation to talk. And then if people want to talk to us, we will. It’s like walking past someone in the street and telling them their hair looks good today. You don’t want anything, you’re not expecting anything, you’re just being human.

Because it’s enjoyable to do so. People are good. Talk to them.

Anyone who has ever picked up the baton for tweeting as SlackHQ has a part to play in this last thing. And in the second part of this, we’ll go deeper into that half of the Twitter voice — the support voice. How the tone is different, and how the voice is scaled.

Finding our Twitter voice was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Human rights lawyer Jess Salomon needed a change, so she took the next logical step: Becoming a standup comic

An audio version of this story can be heard on Episode 3 of Slack’s podcast Work in Progress, a new show about the meaning and identity we find in work.

“I used to be a war crimes lawyer in the Hague before I decided it was time to get serious.”

This is how Jess Salomon usually responds when people ask why on earth she left her job as a human rights attorney to become, of all things, a standup comedian. It is, after all, no one’s idea of a typical career progression. But to Salomon, the connection between social justice and comedy became clear at her most difficult hour, as a way to be an advocate for others while discovering a new part of herself.

In 2002, Salomon landed a dream job for any young, idealistic human rights lawyer — working for the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague as it tried Serbian despot Slobodan Miljković and his deputies from the former Yugoslavia for the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and Croatians. It was everything she had wanted to do with her life, until she discovered that the court system could only do so much for the victims.

“The courtroom isn’t a place for somebody to tell their whole story, which is I think what they needed to do and what they were coming to do and what they thought was the point,” says Salomon. She began to think about what she could do to have a positive impact on the world outside of the law, but had put so much of herself into getting where she was that nothing else made sense.

But then she met some lawyers and jurists whose approach to dealing with the horrifying daily accounts of atrocities and suffering resonated with her.

“Humor in a dark context is a kind of a coping mechanism,” she says. “Certainly not everybody, but for sure the people that I gravitated towards, my friends, all had very dark senses of humor. Because these accused war criminals were big characters — when they came to the tribunal they were a source of a lot of the, I guess the gallows humor behind the scenes.” The defendants, she says, would go to such lengths to obstruct the process that it became almost an absurd play that was impossible not to laugh at and criticize with dark comedy.

Around the same time, The Daily Show was gaining an important place in the political landscape, with a lot of younger people using it as their primary source of news.

“I just started to see this place for comedy as advocacy, says Salomon. “A switch just went off, where I thought oh, maybe there’s another way to advocate for the things that I believe in where I am not buried under a bunch of papers in the basement of a war crimes tribunal.”

With no experience in performance of any kind, and not a lot of encouragement from bewildered family and friends, Salomon decided to take the leap into standup.

“I felt internally that it was something that I could do,” she says. “At least I felt that of all of the arts, writing comedy and performing standup to me made the most sense because it was talking and in a way building arguments around certain ideas and premises. I felt that I had the potential to be funny.”

When Salomon left the Hague, she tried a number of ways into the comedy world. She wrote a sitcom pilot about a war crimes tribunal in the style of The Office, and took a stand-up comedy class. Soon she started doing open mics.

“I didn’t know who I was or what I was doing,” she says. “It just takes a long time. You don’t become Jon Stewart so quickly. I relied a lot on sexual and shock humor as most new comedians do.”

Her background as a war crimes lawyer stoked people’s curiosity, but honing her act took longer. She turned her focus to social justice issues that she could relate to personally, like feminism, identity, and LGBT rights. Now writing and performing full time, Salomon has performed at numerous festivals and keeps a busy touring schedule.

But the human rights lawyer in her is still always there. Her act features dark jokes about being Jewish and learning about the Holocaust as a child, and brings attention to the fact that she is married to a Palestinian woman.

“We had a very tiny wedding, it was really small,” she says in one of her bits. “It was just me, her, and a U.N. peacekeeper.”

Work in Progress story produced by Mio Adilman

The funny thing about a big career pivot was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Wow. Big news! Congratulations on today’s announcements. We’re genuinely excited to have some competition.

We realized a few years ago that the value of switching to Slack was so obvious and the advantages so overwhelming that every business would be using Slack, or “something just like it,” within the decade. It’s validating to see you’ve come around to the same way of thinking. And even though — being honest here — it’s a little scary, we know it will bring a better future forward faster.

However, all this is harder than it looks. So, as you set out to build “something just like it,” we want to give you some friendly advice.

First, and most importantly, it’s not the features that matter. You’re not going to create something people really love by making a big list of Slack’s features and simply checking those boxes. The revolution that has led to millions of people flocking to Slack has been, and continues to be, driven by something much deeper.

Building a product that allows for significant improvements in how people communicate requires a degree of thoughtfulness and craftsmanship that is not common in the development of enterprise software. How far you go in helping companies truly transform to take advantage of this shift in working is even more important than the individual software features you are duplicating.

Communication is hard, yet it is the most fundamental thing we do as human beings. We’ve spent tens of thousands of hours talking to customers and adapting Slack to find the grooves that match all those human quirks. The internal transparency and sense of shared purpose that Slack-using teams discover is not an accident. Tiny details make big differences.

Second, an open platform is essential. Communication is just one part of what humans do on the job. The modern knowledge worker relies on dozens of different products for their daily work, and that number is constantly expanding. These critical business processes and workflows demand the best tools, regardless of vendor.

That’s why we work so hard to find elegant and creative ways to weave third-party software workflows right into Slack. And that’s why there are 750 apps in the Slack App Directory for everything from marketing automation, customer support, and analytics, to project management, CRM, and developer tools. Together with the thousands of applications developed by customers, more than six million apps have been installed on Slack teams so far.

We are deeply committed to making our customers’ experience of their existing tools even better, no matter who makes them. We know that playing nice with others isn’t exactly your MO, but if you can’t offer people an open platform that brings everything together into one place and makes their lives dramatically simpler, it’s just not going to work.

Third, you’ve got to do this with love. You’ll need to take a radically different approach to supporting and partnering with customers to help them adjust to new and better ways of working.

When we push a same-day fix in response to a customer’s tweet, agonize over the best way to slip some humor into release notes, run design sprints with other software vendors to ensure our products work together seamlessly, or achieve a 100-minute average turnaround time for a thoughtful, human response to each support inquiry, that’s not “going above and beyond.” It’s not “us being clever.” That’s how we do. That’s who we are.

We love our work, and when we say our mission is to make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive, we’re not simply mouthing the words. If you want customers to switch to your product, you’re going to have to match our commitment to their success and take the same amount of delight in their happiness.

One final point: Slack is here to stay. We are where work happens for millions of people around the world.

You can see Slack at work in nearly every newsroom and every technology company across the country. Slack powers the businesses of architects and filmmakers and construction material manufacturers and lawyers and creative agencies and research labs. It’s the only tool preferred by both late night comedy writers and risk & compliance officers. It is in some of the world’s largest enterprises as well as tens of thousands of businesses on the main streets of towns and cities all over the planet. And we’re just getting started.

So welcome, Microsoft, to the revolution. We’re glad you’re going to be helping us define this new product category. We admire many of your achievements and know you’ll be a worthy competitor. We’re sure you’re going to come up with a couple of new ideas on your own too. And we’ll be right there, ready.

— Your friends at Slack

Dear Microsoft, was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Reactions and other tips for using emoji to get work done

We love emoji. They’re fun, light-hearted, and convey a broad range of emotions efficiently and in a way that words sometimes can’t. We use them profusely at Slack—to acknowledge one another and in our daily workflows.

The efficiency of reactions

After introducing emoji reactions last year, our own Slack team saw a dip in the total number of messages sent. With hundreds of members communicating across a couple thousand channels, it was a welcome change. Before emoji reactions, messages begot more messages: replies, questions, acknowledgment. In a word, noise.

Prior to releasing emoji reactions, we had a general rule that no matter how good the news, we’d limit responses to five messages. With reactions added to the mix, we no longer have to hold back!

Our common reaction language

One year later, we’ve found that a handful of emoji reactions—or “reacji” as we sometimes say—go a long way in replacing follow-up messages.

In channels for feature requests and brainstorming, we use :heavy_plus_sign: to say “I agree” or “add my vote to this.”

Other common reacji and how we commonly use them:

:raised_hands: or :bow: — a simple “thank you”
:thumbsup: — “I agree” or “got it!”
:clap: — “well done!”
:tada:— “Happy Birthday” or “congrats”
:dart:— “bullseye” / “nailed it”
:joy:— crying-while-laughing, your joke was so000 good
:airhorn: —(custom emoji) speaking of jokes, hmmm, maybe try that one again ;)

Beyond reactions: voting, polling, and requests

When you need to make a group decision, try sharing the options in a message and ask your audience to mark them with:one: or :two:(and so on) for the option they prefer. Especially in a busy channel, it’s remarkable to see how quickly a decision gets made.

A handy tip for fielding requests: if you leave a message asking for help, someone can volunteer by reacting with:eyes:. That means they’re going to take a look. Once the work is done, we like to use :white_check_mark: to mark it as complete.

When an employee stumbles on a problem with our software, they’ll often leave a message describing what they experienced and how to reproduce it. Software engineers reading those same channels can leave a :bug: reaction to let others know the bug has been logged and a fix is on the way.

Other custom quirks

Some Slack employees have custom emoji made from their tiny bio photos. Often, adding someone’s “head” as a reaction emoji is a way of saying either “they’ll do it” or “this sounds like their area of expertise” or as a simple, cheeky acknowledgment of their contribution.

We’ve started a habit of associating certain emoji with teams. For example, if someone posts an idea in the feature request channel, and someone on the platform development team thinks it’s a good idea, they’ll add a custom platypus emoji reaction to the message. Anyone on team platform can search for has::platypus:, find every message tagged with it, and quickly generate a list of feature ideas. Explaining why platform picked the platypus is a story for another day.

We have over two dozen triage channels at Slack with names such as #triage-ios and #triage-sales, where teams handle thorny problems. To make it easy to scroll through and spot major problems, we use emoji to precede messages. A :red_circle:, for instance, denotes an urgent problem, while :blue_circle: indicates a non-urgent question. A:white_circle: means someone is seeking some feedback. We even wrote a custom bot to remind us about requests that are still unanswered hours later.

We also raccoon discussions to more appropriate channels. If people are talking about something and there’s a separate channel dedicated to the subject, or it’s chatty banter happening in a low-noise channel, anyone is free to post our team’s custom :raccoon: emoji to redirect conversations elsewhere. It’s never meant to be negative or a shaming move, just a way to better organize our discussions and be mindful of others’ time and attention spans. (We were delighted to see how the U.S. government design group 18F incorporated raccooning into their own employee Slack handbook.)

Speaking of 18F, check out their blog post about using emoji reactions for knowledge management. They tag all “evergreen” content found in channels with:evergreen_tree:, and use a search query like the one mentioned above to find new messages worth codifying in their handbooks. At Slack, we do something similar, where anyone can tag a message with :notebook: to indicate it might be worth adding to the company’s internal documentation.

We’d love to hear how you use emoji to make work simpler and easier for your team. Tweet us @slackhq to let us know how it’s going.

Some of the ways we use emoji at Slack was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How architect Barry Svigals took on an extraordinary task

An extended audio version of this story can be heard on Episode 4 of Work in Progress, Slack’s new podcast about the meaning and identity we find in work.

O n December 14, 2012, a disturbed young man with a high-powered rifle forced his way into a local elementary school, and began shooting. Sandy Hook was left to deal with the seismic shock of senseless violence and its aftermath.

It’s difficult to rebuild in the wake of such a horrific event, but life had to go on in the town of Newtown, Connecticut. Plans were made to demolish the old school and solicit bids from area firms for a new school’s construction.

Architect Barry Svigals and his firm won the bid. But when town officials asked him in initial meetings about his vision for the new design, he confessed he had no idea.

“We knew something was needed, but it was important for us to recognize that we did not know what,” says Svigals. “That not knowing was an essential companion throughout the entire process.”

Svigals formed a committee with representatives from both the school and the town. In lengthy discussions, they began to come up with the school’s design together.

A typical question was, for example, “What do you love about your home?” Seemingly indirect questions like these ended up being essential to forming the direction of the design. Svigals stresses how important the committee’s answers were to help “have a place for one’s children to learn and to grow and to thrive and to be nourished. It must come from love, frankly.”

Now the school’s construction is complete and one of its most striking features is its warm color. It’s sided with cedar, giving it a natural, inviting feeling, very much unlike schools most children grew up in.

It’s natural to wonder how building security was addressed in the design, and Svigals’ firm treated it carefully.

His goal was to make “a learning environment to include the necessities of security, but remember that paramount is a learning environment where the children feel alive and safe and nourished by the environment that they’re in.” The design included security measures in ways that also served other purposes.

“For example, in the front of the school, there’s a bioswale that collects the rainwater off the roof,” says Svigals. “It also creates a barrier in front of the school.”

The design of the entrance hallway came from advisory committee discussions about the wish for a welcoming school. The arch of the hallway mimics the gesture of arms extending out to embrace the kids as they come in.

“They enter on the far side of the site and come around in a circle in front of the school,” explains Svigals. “They get to see it and experience it as they come in on the arch of the school and then come in this main entrance, which is really the heart of the school.”

To a certain extent, Svigals’ firm needed to forget they were designing a new school in the context of the trauma.

“We needed to include it,” he says. “It wasn’t denied. Yet within our effort, we needed to keep our attention as much as we possibly could on our charge, which was to make a wonderful new school for the children of Newtown that would endure for many, many years.” That return to their core mission was an essential aspect and a mantra throughout their process.

For a project like this, in the end it’s not just the building site that’s transformed. Svigals sensed it in his own firm and the community as well.

“There’s no question that we all went through a transformation,” he says. “We were chastened by the enormity of the task. We were transformed by the extraordinary resiliency of the community. We were transformed by the courage of the leadership of the town. We needed to bring our best selves to what the task was at each turn and feel that there’s no work alone.”

He added, “It’s mysterious when a community comes together with a collective wish that it calls all of us, calls something in all of us that is larger than anyone of us. I think we felt that.”

Work in Progress story produced by Jim Metzner.

Rebuilding Sandy Hook was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Courtney E. Martin on the secret to a successful freelance life

Unlike our parents or grandparents, many of whom could count on working at one company their entire career, the average American currently switches jobs every 4.6 years. And in a surprising shift, 40% of the U.S. workforce is now freelance.

There are a lot of reasons for this, some worker driven, some not. But when you find yourself navigating both the freedom and uncertainty of freelance life, is there a secret to thriving in this new work world?

In a word, “community,” writes journalist Courtney E. Martin in her new book, The New Better Off, in which she re-examines the American Dream and what the good life really means.

The most successful freelancers, Martin found, have broad and diverse networks of “ideal collaborators” to help them through the highs and lows of freelancing.

Martin would know. At 36, she has never worked a full-time job. Instead, she has created a career out of various writing and speaking assignments. The upsides include enormous flexibility and being able to do work she cares about with people she really likes.

The downsides include financial insecurity and isolation.

“I think the financial insecurity is always going to be there,” she says. “But the isolation is something we can actually do something about.”

Here are some of Martin’s tips on how to fight the isolation and expand your community to help you lead a more successful professional and personal life.

Get out of your pajamas

One of the easiest ways to build community when you’re an independent worker is by setting up shop in a coworking space. Martin dedicates an entire chapter of her book to coworking, where people from different kinds of jobs work together in a shared workspace.

“You get the benefits of community that should exist in the traditional workplace, but in this case, there’s that voluntary vibe,” she says. “You show up when you want to, leave when you want to, and you’re magnetized towards people you genuinely like, not people you get assigned to work with.”

What’s more, according to a Harvard Business Review article she cites, workers in coworking spaces report higher happiness levels than those in traditional office spaces.

Be “kind, generous, and curious”

This may sound obvious, but the best way to build your professional network is to make friends. Be open and genuinely interested in getting to know a diverse group of people. The richest networks, according to Martin, are those composed of people working in a bunch of different fields.

She warns against seeing these relationships as transactional, like that person at a mixer who works the room collecting business cards. It’s more about knowing lots of people and leaving room for serendipity.

“I think the biggest mistake people make with networking is when they think it’s a separate mode from just being a kind, generous, curious human being,” she says.

What about the introverts?

Brilliant networkers tend to be personable and skilled at cultivating relationships. But what if you find yourself on the shyer side?

Get savvy at social media, advises Martin. “It’s a huge gift for introverts.”

So if you’re timid and there’s someone you admire or would like to know, she recommends following them on Twitter and Facebook.

“Tweet their stuff and tell them you like it,” she says.

She also advises that you can stand out by mastering the art of the beautifully crafted email. Martin once helped a woman land a job after receiving such an email in her inbox. (The woman later wrote about the experience for the New York Times.)

Confidence is contagious

Last, and this may sound counterintuitive in a culture that thrives on competition, but when you’re cultivating new relationships, in person or online, don’t be threatened by those who are more successful than you. Be inspired by them.

It’s called “shine theory” and was coined by the journalist Ann Friedman. Essentially it means this: Being friends with smart, accomplished, interesting, creative people will make you look better, not worse. Their shine won’t eclipse you, it will make you glow as well.

“I really love that idea of not shying away from other people’s successes,” says Martin. “That kind of mindset propels you in a different way than if you’re seeing everybody else like ‘They are what I don’t have.’”

Building a work community when you’re going it alone was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Training to help people do their best work, not be a distraction from it

What was the most important thing you learned over the last six months? Picture it in your mind.

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Chances are… your mental picture looked nothing like this:

When asked, not many people cite traditional training as their most valuable learning experiences.

In lots of companies, on-the-job training is greeted with a deep, guttural groan. It’s a mandatory evil, a long series of tasks that take people away from their core work for little benefit. Given that our mission at Slack is to make people’s working lives more productive, these traditional models don’t cut it for us.

And so, we’re thinking about professional learning differently.

Instead of asking: How do we get people to do…

We ask: How might we build a system where the most people possible can succeed?

To answer this critical question, our learning and development team takes a three step approach:

Step One: Pull, not push

At Slack, virtually every learning experience we offer is optional and open to all. This creates a democratic environment where learners are motivated by curiosity, relevancy, and a deep business need.

Instead of “pushing” lots of mandatory content, we allow people to “pull what they need” from an integration between Slack and Bridge, our learning management system. Each learning experience is brief, targeted, and modular. Given that a “search first culture” is one of the core assumptions underlying Slack (the product) — that is, proactively look to see if the answers you need exist before asking a question — it makes sense for our learning program to reflect that as well.

And, because we can’t meet every demand, we offer a professional development stipend for every employee to pursue external programs as needed.

Step Two: Active learning

We offer a wide array of online and in-person learning experiences each month on topics ranging from public speaking to negotiating to handling unconscious biases in the workplace. Whenever possible, we want people to interact with what they’re learning.

Repeated research has shown that adults learn best when they are thrust into problem-solving experiences, not piles of content.

At Slack, it’s common to find groups of people exchanging feedback, role playing, or building prototypes. This makes it more likely that people will transfer their learning back to their day-to-day work experiences. And, of course, that’s really important.

Step Three: Communities of learners

When planning what we’ll tackle next, our learning team at Slack is often heard repeating the phrase “the more the merrier!” This is because we need a diverse set of stakeholders to help us determine which types of learning are most needed.

We’re always looking for the intersection of learner curiosity and business needs. Because we spend a lot of time talking about our goals as a company, this happens quite naturally.

Every quarter we collaboratively choose which learning experiences will have the biggest impact on our team. Our team of collaborators spans across many departments, roles, and levels.

Once designed, many of our courses are facilitated by internal experts from deep within Slack. For example, our leadership academy is peppered with leaders from inside Slack. Who better than current leaders to understand what leadership means within our company?

Yea, but… Does it work?

Although it’s early in our history, our strategies seem to be working. The aggregate net promoter score for our courses is 91, and aggregate comprehension scores are just above 80%. We’re also seeing our attendees uplevel their work in their respective roles as reported by their managers. Of course, we have much more to learn, but these early results seem to show the investment we’re making is a good one.

The more we learn together, the better we’ll be able to tackle what’s next.

How we approach professional learning at Slack was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tradition and progress at New York institution Russ & Daughters

An extended audio version of this story can be heard on Episode 4 of Work in Progress, Slack’s new podcast about the meaning and identity we find in work.

A hundred years ago, before there was a bank and drug store on every Manhattan street corner, Jewish delis and appetizing stores were commonplace. Delis sold things like knishes and sliced meats. Appetizing stores specialized in bagels, spreads, and smoked fish.

It was in this cityscape that Joel Russ opened his appetizing store in 1914. He would eventually call it Russ & Daughters, after his three female heirs. His daughters and their husbands ran the business until 1978, when one of Joel’s grandsons took over. In 2009, the business was passed to the fourth generation.

Today, the store is co-owned by cousins Josh Russ Tupper and Niki Russ Federman, and is one of the few appetizing stores left in New York City. The younger generation that runs it now didn’t plan to carry on the family business — Josh and Niki had very different aspirations. But eventually they seized the opportunity to carry on the family tradition while moving the business forward in a modern world.

A winding road home

Niki Russ Federman’s parents ran Russ & Daughters, and some of her earliest memories are of the store. When Niki was four, delivery men would arrive wheeling giant sacks of onions and potatoes; she would climb on top of the sacks, sit down, and direct the men into the kitchen.

Even though the business is named “and Daughters,” Niki didn’t consider following in her father’s footsteps until years later. “Working in a smoked fish business, working at a counter, was not the typical trajectory for an Amherst College grad,” she says.

After getting a liberal arts degree, Niki worked at an art museum, a nonprofit focused on hunger relief, and in alternative health before she enrolled in business school. But it soon became clear to her that she didn’t want to work for a bank or be a consultant or do the usual things one does with an MBA.

Niki realized that she was passionate about Russ & Daughters and needed to focus less on societal pressure and more on what she really wanted.

“For many years, I felt like if I ended up doing what my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents did, somehow I failed,” she says.

But eventually, she realized “it’s actually a tremendous rarity and gift to be part of a legacy like this.”

Choosing connection

Josh Russ Tupper was raised at an ashram outside the city. But a few times a year, his mother would take him to visit his grandparents and they’d stop by Russ & Daughters, and young Josh would be greeted by the comforting smell of fresh smoked fish.

When he was 26 and working as a semiconductor engineer in the Pacific Northwest, Josh began to question his path.

“What I was doing was very cerebral and very interesting in my mind,” he recalls. “But there was a part of me that wanted to connect to people. I wasn’t getting any of that from my work.”

At the same time, Josh began to reflect on his family history and learned that his uncle Mark — who himself had made a late decision to take over the store after a long career as an attorney — was considering selling the business.

“I felt very strongly that this family business should not leave the family,” he says.

A 102-year-old “start-up”

With fresh eyes and experience earned in different industries, Niki and Josh assumed ownership of the century-old institution in 2009. Upon taking the helm, they realized they could approach the business almost as if it were a “start-up,” using their new ideas to move it forward.

Everywhere they looked there were things they could update and make more efficient, from moving handwritten orders to a computerized sales system, to a website redesign, to a new heating and cooling system. But the cousins knew most of the changes they made would need to be invisible to their customers.

“The fundamental experience that people have in the store has to stay the same,” says Niki.

People often stop by the shop after decades away, breathe in the smell, and express how grateful they are that the place is still feels the same.

“That is hard to come by, especially in a place like New York, where buildings come down and go up and you don’t remember from one day to the next what was there before,” says Niki. “This is an anchor of 102 years of living personal history for so many people.”

Work in Progress story produced by Mio Adilman.

Following in the family footsteps was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A quick recap of some recent updates

Small things add up to make a big difference when you’re trying to get your work done. So in case you missed it, here are a few features we rolled out recently.

Play music and movie files in Slack

Slack now supports .mp3, .mp4, .wav, or .mov files. Upload, share, and play those files in your channels and DMs.

View PDFs right in Slack, too

You no longer have to download PDFs to your computer to preview them. Simply click to open your PDFs right in Slack. (More on how we built this, as well as our media player, over on our engineering blog.)

Share your customized sidebar theme

Have a personalized sidebar theme, like one based on your company’s colors, that you want to share with others? Now, posting 8 hex codes in a channel or DM will enable a “Switch” button that anyone can click on to use those colors as their theme.

Set email privacy options for your team

Team admins can now choose to hide email addresses from user profiles on their teams. Everyone will still need an email address to sign up for Slack, but with this setting, user email addresses won’t be visible to other team members.

Change your default sort options for All Unreads

You can now prioritize how you read through your unread channels in All Unreads: alphabetically, by newest activity, or by oldest activity. If you’re on a paid plan, you can also sort your messages scientifically, which prioritizes All Unreads by how you use Slack.

Swipe to switch teams on iOS

If you’re on more than one Slack team and want to switch between them on iOS, just swipe twice to the right and you’re good to go.

Small improvements like these often come directly from the feedback we get from our customers. Share yours by dropping us a note or tweeting us at @Slackhq.

In case you missed it: music, movies, and more in Slack was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Lessons from three “lifehackers”, 10 years on

I n the early 2000s, during the heyday of blogging and before the rise of social networking, I became obsessed with a sub-genre of blogs focused on productivity, mostly aimed at people working in technology. A blogger myself, these sites—filled with elaborate rituals and systems to keep procrastination at bay—helped me get a little more out of each working day.

Years later, I wonder: Did reading those blogs help me? Did they help their millions of readers? And in a world increasingly filled with potential distractions only a tap away, which of their techniques for staying focused (and happy) have had the most lasting power?

A term emerges

In 2004, Danny O’Brien gave a presentation called “Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks.” O’Brien’s talk described patterns he noticed in hacker friends — that they’d all developed systems for getting work done, they tended to obsessively write things down in text files, and they often used simple command-line utilities instead of bloated do-everything apps. With this talk, the term “lifehack” was born and it spread through technology culture.

In the years that followed, O’Brien chronicled “life hacks” in venues like a column in Make Magazine, but these days he works as the international director at the Electronic Freedom Foundation.

O’Brien says he still looks for ways to automate aspects of his life, and his favorite thing to do is browse Github looking for “half-baked but useful scripts” that mostly solve the problem he’s seeking. Many of his tools remain unchanged: his primary communication is still email, which he reads in a command-line Mutt client with plenty of custom scripts. And he continues to keep to-do lists in text files.

“In the end everything I do is just all text,” says O’Brien “It’s not like a simple text file format is superior, but it’s ubiquitous, and flexible.”

Getting to inbox zero

Merlin Mann launched 43folders.com soon after reading about O’Brien’s talk. His site was filled with tips on the best Mac software for getting work done as well lessons learned from popular productivity books, adapted for the new digital age.

“I was a project manager at the time and was feeling overwhelmed,” Mann says. “That was causing me to seek out all of this stuff. It just kind of made sense to share it with people.”

For the next five years, Mann developed his Inbox Zero philosophy about managing time and attention, which centered on not letting distractions rule your life. He recognized that these new tools and avenues of communication could overwhelm us if we let them.

Today, Mann spends most of his time as a podcast host. His shows tackle similar topics, but instead of talking strictly about productivity, Back to Work explores the root causes and behaviors that lead to people feeling overwhelmed.

As technology changes, he insists it’s important to revisit your workflows, to stay loose and pliable, and consider new approaches instead of fearing change and shutting down.

“Procrastination in a nut, is feeling terrible that you haven’t done something that in your heart you know you’re never going to do,” says Mann. “That’s no way to live.”

The lifehacker

Gina Tripani was a software engineer at Gawker.com, and when her boss Nick Denton mentioned he purchased “lifehacker.com” but didn’t know what to do with it, she had plenty of ideas. Instead of hiring a dedicated writer, Denton asked her to take the helm, and in January of 2005, she launched Lifehacker. To this day, the site has an audience of over 20 million daily readers.

“The combination of reading about self improvement, personal productivity, and writing 20 posts a day — I was applying the techniques I was writing about onto that job,” says Tripani.

Looking back, Tripani admits that Lifehacker’s busy publishing schedule was a bit much. She says posting four or five useful, considered posts each week instead of dozens per day would have been more respectful of readers’ time and attention — ironically allowing them to get more of their own work done — but there wasn’t a business model for fewer posts back then.

These days she’s back to being a software engineer, and the biggest thing that stuck with her is the process of writing everything down. Her mantra is to “capture everything, externalize, get it out of my head” and refer back to her notes constantly.

She also realized organizing her work around a to-do list was too short term and didn’t give her perspective to tackle larger issues in her life. She’s since expanded these ideas into her own three-tiered framework, where a dozen or so major life goals manifest into dozens of projects, and her daily to-dos end up as tasks in each project. Every week she takes time to review her progress on tasks, projects, and goals, and adjusts accordingly.

“I’m still a huge list maker” says Tripani. “The to-do lists, not to hammer that home, it’s a form of anxiety management for me.”

To get it done, write it down was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Filmmaker Mohamed Alborno dreams of a place for those who are citizens of nowhere

An extended audio version of this story can be heard on Episode 6 of Work in Progress, Slack’s podcast about the meaning and identity we find in work.

A few years back, Mohamed Alborno was standing in a kitchen in Manchester, England, talking about his first film, about a man who wants to start a new country because he can’t return to his own.

“Mohamed, who do you think this character is?” someone asked him.

Alborno figured the man in his movie was just some figment of his imagination, a man trying to get somewhere. But when he thought about it a bit more, it dawned on him.

“Oh my god,” he realized. The character was him.

If Alborno had a country to return to, it might be Palestine, though he and his parents, who are Palestinian refugees, aren’t allowed to live there. Egypt is another possibility. Alborno was born in Egypt and grew up there, but because his parents aren’t Egyptian, he was never granted citizenship.

Though he’s a permanent resident of Canada, Alborno isn’t a citizen anywhere. The technical term for his status is “stateless.” According to the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, he is one of at least 10 million people around the world who don’t have a nationality.

Alborno compares being a resident of a country and not a citizen to living as a guest in someone else’s house. You’re constantly trying to keep a low profile and not make any trouble.

“You don’t live fully,” he says.

What Alborno failed to grasp back when he was working on his first film, was how much this part of his identity informs his work.

This can be true for many of us. We might choose a certain field because of our interests or personality or because of some hidden part of ourselves. Sometimes it’s obvious, like when a childhood love of pets leads you to become a vet. Sometimes it’s less so, like when you realize afterward that you just made a movie about yourself.

“I created this fictional character as a safe way of expressing what I want to see and talking about my story without being confrontational,” Alborno explains, with the clarity of hindsight.

Today, Alborno is based in Toronto, where he does start-up consulting and makes documentary films, and is not only aware that his past influences his work, he fully embraces it.

In fact, his first film has gone on to become a true story.

Alborno is currently working on documentary called The New Country Film Project. It’s a crowd-sourced production that features people around the world answering questions about identity, nationality and citizenship, and imagining things they would like to see in a new country — like a system where people are paid according to their level of kindness and what they contribute to their community.

The film also follows people creating new countries in places ranging from man-made islands to online countries like BitNation.

“The ultimate goal of the project is to ask those questions about our humanity, about those labels that we put on one another, and accordingly decide your fate in life,” Alborno explains.

The project has also inspired Alborno to start his own country, just like that character in his first film.

In Alborno’s online country, no land will been taken from anyone to create it. There will be no fights about borders or need for a military. He envisions an online place where people can barter, connect, and perhaps appoint ambassadors.

And above all, he wants to create a place where stateless people, such as himself, can travel freely and take for granted that they belong.

“My wildest dream would be to offer people the freedom of movement,” he says. “With their physical needs covered, so that they can think what really, really matters and what this life is about, what brought us here in the first place.”

Work in Progress story produced by Dan Misener.

A country for the countryless was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How the ecommerce platform uses Slack to educate customers

“Could we deflect customer support tickets by having better resources for people to help themselves?” That’s the core question Dana Tessier, Director of Knowledge Management at Ottawa-based ecommerce platform Shopify, and her global team ask themselves in their day-to-day work.

Nestled within the wider Customer Support Team, Tessier leads a team of over 30 people who oversee Shopify’s array of internal and external documentation. The external-facing properties include everything from their vast help center site (help.shopify.com) to active online support communities, forums, and webinars. Every bit of knowledge serves to help Shopify merchants get their online stores up and running in little time.

Managing the constant ebb and flow of information is a tricky dance requiring ample communication. That’s where Tessier’s team has found Slack to be especially useful. Over the last year, they’ve even customized some features to surface new knowledge for customers.

Staying on top of change

As the product team develops the platform, even the simplest design change requires updates to help center pages and internal databases.

“There’s a lot of maintenance that has to happen all the time, whether the changes are big or small, our job is to keep everything consistent and up to date,” explains Tessier. “A lot of communication is necessary to keep us all in line.”

Opening lines of communication across the organization

“People really like to be able to converse and just ask someone and get an answer as easy as possible,” says Tessier. “That’s become the bar for getting information in Shopify.”

Her distributed team (spread out across Canada, Ireland, the Philippines and more) uses public and private channels to organize conversations and keep updates visible to multiple teams and departments. To give you an idea of their workflow, here are some examples of how they use Slack to communicate:

• Technical writers convene in public channels (like #writers) to get updates on the status of projects and talk about wording, format and style. Members from other teams join these channels as needed to ask questions and give the team a heads up on errors and required updates (more hands, or eyes, make for light work).
• Team members belong to various public product-related channels (#prod-engineering, for example) that gather product design and engineering teams, helping Tessier’s team stay updated on product changes as they happen.
• Private team channels house discussions on day-to-day operations, roles, and general team banter. Some teams even choose to nix their daily stand-up or status meetings in favor of updates in Slack (which gives team leaders an easy way to stay updated on what everyone’s working on and a good way of identifying blockers that team leaders can help with).
• The live-stream channel (aptly named #livestream) is the go-to place for remote employees to join team meetings. Tessier advises updating the channel topic with the subject of the next meeting and the link to the livestream so team members don’t have to look for it every time.
• As a director with numerous reports, Tessier belongs to various private channels set up for members of leadership where they exchange tips on management, receive company-wide news to share with their teams and generally support one another.

“Being able to communicate with people transparently is crucial to building relationships and it has really increased cooperation across our teams,” says Tessier. “Slack helps us keep our open culture and makes it easier for us to be able to talk to different people about anything.”

Surfacing new opportunities with clever Slack customizations

With so many conversations coursing through Slack channels, Tessier’s team started experimenting with integrations in the Spring of 2016 to capture new ideas and information.

“Say you ask me a question in Slack and I answer,” she says. “If I realize that my answer is information that lives in my head rather than in our internal or external knowledge bases, then I star that message.”

The team set up an integration through Zapier where whenever a designated team member stars a message (to signify that it’s undocumented knowledge), that message automatically creates a ticket in Zendesk.

From the ticket, team members can click a link that goes directly to the starred message in its original context. This undocumented information can then be added to the internal and external knowledge bases.

With more people communicating and sharing knowledge across the company, and thanks to some of the team’s crafty integrations, they’ve managed to make over 80 new updates to their internal and external knowledge bases in just a few months.

Looking back at the team’s progress, Tessier notes: “I’m still amazed at how much information and internal knowledge is transferred through Slack every day.”

Building a more helpful help center with Shopify was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How Nancy Pearl’s life’s work has taken her from bestselling author to action figure

An extended audio version of this story can be heard on Episode 7 of Work in Progress, Slack’s podcast about the meaning and identity we find in work.

I f Nancy Pearl was ever going to write a memoir, it would begin like this: “I went to Mukilteo to be digitized.”

Mukilteo is a small town north of Seattle and it’s the place where in 2003 Pearl stood on a rotating platform while a camera took photos of her every angle in order to create an action figure in her likeness. A librarian action figure.

Pearl worked at the Seattle Public Library at the time as the director of the Washington Center for the Book, and was well known locally due to her regular public radio appearances to recommend books. A year earlier, she had met a man who owned a novelty company at a dinner party and the idea to create a librarian action figure modeled after her was floated as a joke. Pearl never thought she’d hear another word about it.

“Everybody thought, ‘Who wants a librarian action figure?’ But it turns out that many, many, many thousands of people have a librarian somewhere in their background that they think fondly of,” Pearl says. “Librarians play a very quiet, but important part in many people’s lives.”

The librarian in her background

Every day after school and every Saturday morning, as a little girl in Detroit, Pearl would walk or ride her bike to the local library because home was not a happy place. The library was a refuge, thanks to its endless stacks of books and a certain librarian named Francis Whitehead, who took a liking to Pearl and would play a pivotal role in her life.

“She was the person who really gave me lots of love and lots and lots of wonderful books to read,” Pearl recalls. “Both of those things were very important to me.”

By age 10, Pearl knew she wanted to become a librarian just like Miss Whitehead. Because the library was best place in the world, she figured, and because of something she wouldn’t be able to articulate until years later.

“Librarians perform miracles,” Pearl says. “We change lives by giving people the information they need, the escape they need through books.”

After Pearl became a librarian, her first job was in the Detroit public library system, just like Miss Whitehead.

Today, Pearl is retired, but her long career as a “reading evangelist” took her from Michigan to Oklahoma to Washington, from local radio to NPR to becoming a best-selling author.

Pearl attributes much of her success to other people: “Everything wonderful that’s happened to me has happened because I was friends or good acquaintances with somebody else,” she says. But of course, following the path of a lifelong passion owes at least as much to Pearl’s own ability to seize opportunities and take risks.

From the South to the Pacific Northwest

Pearl moved to Oklahoma when her husband got a job at a university there, and worked at a good friend’s bookstore for nine years. But when the store started having financial troubles, she found an opportunity to return to the library life by chatting up a customer who happened to work at the Tulsa Public Library and told her about two open positions.

Pearl’s boss in Tulsa, with whom she had become very good friends, eventually took a job with the Seattle library system and had a proposal: to create a job for Pearl that would be all about spreading the word about good books and increasing awareness about library programs. The job also offered Pearl the opportunity to leave Oklahoma, where she was tired of always finding herself the most liberal person in the room.

But there was very real downside to the position. It would require Pearl and her husband to live in different states for four years until he retired.

The couple survived the separation by talking on the phone every night. In retrospect, all that phone time allowed them to slow down and share intimate details about their daily lives that they might have ignored in the blur of daily cohabitation.

“It was, I think, a very valuable part of our marriage,” she says.

Her husband eventually joined her in Seattle, where Pearl was making a name for herself with her library outreach programs. In 2011, Library Journal named her “Librarian of the Year.” Then came the action figure, and a best-selling book of recommendations for readers called Book Lust. And she recently finished her first novel, which comes out next year.

But more than a successful career, Pearl’s life in the library always goes back to how Miss Whitehead and the Detroit Public Library helped her discover herself.

“I think the libraries do things that no other public institution does, which is when anyone walks into the library they are equal to everyone else,” she says. “I think reading everything takes you out of yourself and every time you’re out of yourself you’re learning and you’re becoming someone a little bit better.”

Work in Progress story produced by Tara Brockwell.

Adventures of a world-famous librarian was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How a fugitive slave founded Toronto’s first taxi company

An extended audio version of this story can be heard on Episode 8 of Work in Progress, Slack’s podcast about the meaning and identity we find in work.

When Thornton Blackburn arrived in Canada in 1833, like so many immigrants to the New World, he carried with him the dream to create a better life than the one he left behind.

During his first year, Blackburn was working as a waiter when he overheard people talking about a new form of transportation that had just arrived in Montreal. It came from London and was called the hackney cab.

The first cabs looked very different than the taxis of today. They were horse-drawn carriages and the driver sat up front, exposed to the elements. In 1837 Thornton Blackburn had one built that was painted yellow with red trim. He called it “The City” and began driving passengers around for a fee.

In doing so, he started the first taxi business in Toronto.

It was impressive feat for a new immigrant, and all the more impressive given that Thornton Blackburn was a fugitive slave from the American South — one of around 35,000 escapees from slavery who settled in Canada before the Civil War.

“He wanted to be in charge of his own life and he and his wife wanted to be independent,” says Karolyn Smardz Frost, a historian who spent 20 years researching the life of Blackburn and his wife, Lucie.

By starting his own business, Blackburn was able to generate income that he and Lucie could control. It’s an empowering position for anyone, but was especially meaningful to the Blackburns, who had never earned wages for their labor under slavery. They did so well that Blackburn, who was illiterate, was able to retire at age 55.

“If he couldn’t read or write, he certainly was just fine with numbers,” says Smardz Frost.

To understand the story of the Blackburns and all that they achieved, it’s important to understand where they came from. The Blackburns were born into slavery in Kentucky. Thornton was hired out to a dry goods store and Lucie was a nursemaid to a family. After her owners died, Lucie was auctioned off and was going to be sent away.

On the eve of their forced separation, the couple, forged free papers in hand, talked their way onto a steamboat north.

They spent the next two years in Detroit, until they were recognized and caught. The story of how the eluded their captors and escaped across the river to Canada is one for the history books.

“The very night that they were judged to be sent back to slavery, the local black community met,” says Smardz Frost. “Those families got together and figured out a way to rescue the Blackburns.”

Lucie was able to slip out of her jail cell after a visitor switched places with her. Thornton’s escape was more dramatic. His captors brought him to the jailhouse door with shackles on his hands and feet and intended to send him back to Kentucky. Detroit residents had another idea.

“The community, black and white, rose up and marched down the street towards the jail,” says Smardz Frost.

When the crowd reached the jailhouse, someone threw Thornton a pistol and instructed him to shoot the sheriff. Wisely, he didn’t. A group of men then grabbed Thornton and raced towards the river, where they put him in a small boat. Across the river in Canada, he reunited with Lucie and they began their life in freedom.

The story could end here, with Thornton becoming a successful businessman, but it doesn’t. Instead of getting comfortable with their newfound wealth, the Blackburns lived out their days modestly and channeled their money into helping others.

A year after Thornton began driving passengers around in his cab, he had saved enough money to buy his mother out of slavery. He bravely took the Underground Railroad back to the Kentucky border to rescue the woman he had been taken from when he was 3-years-old.

The Blackburns were very active in antislavery activities in Toronto and built six houses, which they rented for a pittance to families of fugitive slaves who had made it across the border.

They were eventually designated persons of national historic significance in Canada, and their story is still taught to schoolchildren there, but Smardz Frost dreams of a day when they are household names.

“It’s a story of hope, freedom, human ingenuity, courage and business development that I think deserves to be known on a much broader scale,” she says.

Work in Progress story produced by Tara Brockwell.

Driven to make history was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How machines and humans together will transform the future of work

I f anyone can calm fears of a robot apocalypse, it’s Kevin Kelly. Over the years — first as the founding executive editor of Wired, then as the author of books like What Technology Wants and Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World — he has become one of the 21st century’s most prescient theorists not only on the future of technology but also on our constantly evolving relationship with it.

In his latest book, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape Our Future, Kelly writes about the unstoppable trends that we often fear when it comes to technological progress. In a recent interview with Slack, he laid out his vision of the future of work and some simple reasons why we may want to reconsider some of our deep-rooted anxieties about it.

Why do you think there’s such a huge amount of fear around automation and AI?

Our intelligence is so central to our identity, that when someone suggests that we can synthesize it, and install into other things, it immediately empties us of our identity and we say, “What are we going to do?” If there’s a suggestion in any way that it’s better, that other things are better, then it’s like, “That’s game over for us.” There’s a direct 1–2 step. Nobody has had any trouble making that step to, I’m not relevant, I’m not needed. I think that scenario, where these AIs come and take over, is very Hollywood, it’s very cinematic. That story is so clear that it’s very hard to have an alternative story.

In my book, I’m trying to make an alternative scenario of AI, where this is a good thing for everybody, that we are prospering, that humanity is better and is improving. But I have to say, it’s a difficult picture to paint, because it’s complex and nuanced and also plural. There’s a lot of [possibilities], while in the alternative Hollywood version, there’s only one story: we die.

You describe the future of technology as a series of endless upgrades where we are all perpetual newbies. Are we going to need to think of ourselves as in need of constant upgrades?

I’m suggesting we actually make this a very clear agenda — say that we are dependent on the technology that we’re making, and that it makes us better. This entails constant learning and relearning and unlearning. That skill will become pretty central to anybody, whatever kind of job or work or play that they’re doing.

You are going to be confronted with new things that you have to either decide it’s not for you or become familiar with it and make it integral to what you do. Then, be ready to leave it behind when the next thing comes. When I was [a kid], that was not what we were being taught in school. There was a definite sense of, “Here’s the skills that you need. You master these, you’re set.” That’s no longer true.

A lot of job satisfaction, people’s happiness, comes from a sense of expertise. What happens to mastery in a world where we are forever newbies? What does this increasing pace of tech do to the idea of being really great at something?

In my study of technology, I was really surprised to discover that in fact, on the planetary global scale, that there’s been no technology that’s gone extinct. Nothing. There are more blacksmiths alive today than ever before in history. There are more people making telescopes by hand than ever before in history. There are more masters at flint-making, arrowhead-making, than ever. I’m talking about absolute numbers, not percentages. The point is that the option for those who want to master something is still there.

There just aren’t going to be many of that particular species, whatever it is. If you’re an Excel jockey, there will certainly be a role for you for a long, long time — but there may not be many of you. [In the future] it will be easier to find that person. For whatever reason, in the year 2070, if you need it, you’ll be able to find the three people in the world who can still do Excel.

I think most of the mastery, though, will be at the meta-level. If you want an answer, you’ll ask a machine.

Machines will have answers. What humans are good at are questions.

A lot of mastery will reside in AI and the kinds of systems we make. It’ll be knowing how to find the right person, knowing how to access that expertise.

In another part of the book that touches on finding meaning in work, you talk about how new tools and online platforms have led to increased collaboration. How does that play into the way that we’ve traditionally structured human work, how we organize our working lives?

The long term trends we see in the world of institutions has been this decentralization of all kinds of things.

In the past, when there wasn’t a lot of information, top-down, centralized command was by far the best way to get things done.

To lead an army in the Roman era, you had the general giving orders down to the foot soldiers, because the flow of information was so restricted that following orders was the best way to get things done in large groups.

Now we have peer-to-peer communication, which makes possible better ways to work together. We’re going to continue this shift towards more and more collaboration, at higher and higher levels. Larger and larger scales. The technologies that we’re inventing enable us to collaborate in real time at the scale of a billion people. I think that changes the opportunities that we have in work. That will enable us to do many, many new kinds of things that we had just not even imagined before.

Original interview by Dan Misener, intro and editing by Devon Maloney.

Wired founder Kevin Kelly on letting go of AI anxiety was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re partnering with Google to bring our shared customers a suite of deep integrations. Turns out many of you love using Slack and Google together — so much so that millions of Google Drive files are shared in Slack each month. Moving forward, you’ll be able to do even more with our products. Here’s a look at what’s coming.

Get updates from the Drive Bot

Google Drive is building a bot! For teams that use Slack and Google Drive together, including Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, comments and requests for access can sometimes languish in email notifications. Now those notifications will arrive where you’re already working — inside Slack, via the Google Drive bot. The bot will use message buttons to enable you to approve, reject and settle comments from Slack, or you can open up Google Docs to resolve them there.

Send a file to your team with assurance they have permission to view it

To make your lives simpler, we’re going to take some of the peskier permission-checking off your plate, and ensure that files shared in Slack are accessible to the right people. This means that when a file is shared in a channel, Slack will check that it is accessible to the group you’ve shared it with. If not, you will be prompted to update your sharing settings.

Connect Slack channels to Team Drives

To keep your content and conversations in sync, admins will be able to connect Team Drives (new shared spaces for teams to store files) with Slack channels. New files uploaded to the connected Slack channel will be automatically backed up to a Team Drive, and Team Drive updates will be shared in Slack. For customers who want advanced cloud storage controls, we’ll also be providing an option to use a Team Drive as the main data store for any files uploaded to Slack.

Preview Google Docs in Slack

We’re also working with the Google Docs team to bring Doc previews into Slack, so that Docs shared in Slack will display the content you need at-a-glance.

You’ll be able to provision Slack from G Suite

Admins will be able to provision Slack for their entire company from the G Suite admin console. This feature will work for new and existing Slack teams, and will be especially useful for large orgs, as it ensures accounts are provisioned and removes potential for user error.

These integrations will be available for your team to use in the first half of 2017, but they’re just the start. As users of Google Cloud ourselves, we’re thrilled about this partnership and how it will simplify our working lives. So, a thank you to the team at Google for helping us bring this first phase to our many customers who rely on both of our products to power their teams.

Sign up to be notified about these updates when they’re ready for your team to use.

Slack + Google: Partners at work was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How a corporate recruiter found meaning helping people in recovery

An extended audio version of this story can be heard on Episode 9 of Work in Progress, Slack’s podcast about the meaning and identity we find in work.

Nearly 20 years later, Margo Walsh still remembers the moment, sitting in a rehab facility in Portland, Maine, like it was yesterday.

Walsh was smoking a cigarette and thinking about her life — about the bruises on her body that came from falling down the stairs drunk, about her liver count, which she just learned that at 32 was that of an old man, and how it was finally time to admit, after drinking for more than half of her life, that she had a problem.

A tiny window in the room looked out on sky filled with steel gray clouds, and it had just started to snow. Suddenly, a shaft of light came through the window and flooded the room with a bright glow, and Walsh was overcome with a feeling she had never felt before. It was a feeling of great calm and of letting-go.

“I have never felt that absolute a sense of peace,” she recalls. “Christmas Day 1997, was my moment of absolute clarity.”

That’s when Walsh’s recovery truly began. It would be a long road, one that would involve her leaving a high-powered corporate recruiting career on Wall Street and finding her calling by starting a business helping people in recovery get back to work.

The men Walsh employs at her company, MaineWorks, are an entirely different clientele than the Ivy League graduates she used to recruit when she worked at Goldman Sachs. They are convicted felons and drug addicts, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I would rather work with the intensity of the broken place. The vulnerable. The outcast, “ she says. “Because that’s where grace happens, at the absolute bottom.”

Where it began

Walsh grew up in Cumberland, Maine, one of six children. Her parents were Irish immigrants who drank a lot. They were also medical doctors who cared about others.

“Both of my parents were very kind and altruistic,” she says. “I have an incredible sense of connection to humanity.”

From a young age, Walsh knew she wanted to help people. On family trips, she used to press her face against the car window and imagine the lives of the people inside the houses she passed. She read psychology books and dreamed of becoming a psychologist.

Her addiction also began in childhood. Sweets were forbidden at home, but she used to cram sugar cubes into her mouth and binge on candy.

“That is the basis of my alcoholism,” she says. “Stuffing an incredible amount of sugar, needing it desperately, and then going home and lying about it.”

At 15, Walsh discovered wine. She drank for the next 17 years, through college, during her time at Goldman Sachs and into her next role as a recruiter for a management consulting firm. She drank in the beginning of her marriage and after she had her first son, right up until one terrible drunken night landed her in rehab.

Building a bridge

After her moment of clarity in 1997, Walsh stayed sober and returned to her husband, young son, and corporate job in Connecticut. But she was a changed person. She had worked for years to create the life she had, but she was filled with feelings of shame and of being an “imposter” everywhere but in her recovery support meetings.

“I couldn’t believe there was actually a place where you could show up and be absolutely broken and be welcomed,” she says.

In 2000, Walsh and her husband moved their family to Maine so she could be closer to her ailing father. She spent much of the following decade as a stay-at home mom and as a volunteer leading recovery support groups at the local jail and at a shelter for alcoholics.

One day, Walsh heard a famous lawyer give a talk about the importance of hiring convicted felons, and she had the idea to use her recruiting skills to help felons and addicts transition to a more stable life.

She started MaineWorks in 2011, and chose her company’s logo very intentionally. It’s a bridge.

“I feel like my role in life is to facilitate transition,” she says.

And every weekday, Walsh fulfills that role by rising at 5 a.m. to drive those attempting to better their lives to work at construction sites. It gives her purpose and belonging.

“It replaces church,” she says.

Work in Progress story produced by Mio Adilman.

Where grace happens was originally published in Several People Are Typing — The Official Slack Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.