Slack guidelines

This page will acquaint you with how we use Slack in Dext. It’s organised by topic. Please read it carefully.

Slack profile

Your Slack profile is the first thing most of your coworkers see about you. Please fill it in neatly. It’s best to fill in all the fields, but the following are mandatory:

Upload an Image. It makes Slack considerably more personal. Don’t just put in any picture there – use a photo where we can see your face and you can be identified.

If you’re an engineer, make sure your username in Slack matches the one in GitHub. If you don’t have GitHub, you can ignore this.

Channels

You should already be in the following channels. Please join them if you are not.

There are many channels for various topics, so it might be worth it to give a quick glance over the list and see if you’re interested in any. But don’t fret too much about it – if you are needed somewhere, people will invite you.

Creating new channels

Feel free to create new channels any time you need to. Here are some guidelines:

Keep in mind that channel names are unique, even for private channels. If you intend to create multiple channels for related topics, it is nice to prefix them with a single short word or abbreviation.

Messaging people

Slack is intended for asynchronous communication. This means that people don’t need to be in it at the same time – somebody can message you now and you can reply later, when you see the message. In practice, this means two things:

Avoid the cardinal sin of sending just “Hi” and waiting for the other side to reply. There is nothing wrong with pleasantries, but include why you are contacting the person and preferably something actionable for them to do. If you have a question and you think you might want to have a meeting, don’t just say “Hi, can we talk?” or “Can we have a meeting later today?”. Add some context and allow them to give you a meaningful reply.

Statuses

The two most commonly used statuses should be “🌴 Vacationing” and “🤒 Out sick”.

Please use statuses only as means to communicate availability or if your current situation is atypical. If you are always working remotely, there is no point in setting “🏡 Working Remotely”. Also, avoid setting a status only as a joke.

When you set your status to “🌴 Vacationing”, edit the default text to add when you’ll be back, e.g. “Vacationing (back on Sept 25th)”. This is very useful for people who want to contact you as they’ll immediately see when you’ll be back.