Whether you’re an experienced old hand at remote collaboration or one of the millions forced into it recently, the frustrations are the same. If your team is large, complex, or simply very chatty, there’s a dynamic tension to resolve on a continual basis: finding sufficient focus and avoiding distraction when you need to do your concentrated deep work tasks, while making sure you don’t overlook critical information and action points being shared in the endless flow of conversation and notifications.
FOMO vs. overload
You can do a lot by really mastering your notifications down to the individual channel level, and getting an agreement in place about how different channels communications tools are used. But this relies on a shared understanding of both what’s important in the first place, and how essential it is to stick to a communication protocol – both of which can be hard to establish when a team is adjusting to a whole new way of working.
Ryan Prosser, CEO of Very, has had more than 18 months to adjust to fully remote working. But his team of 50+ employees quickly found with Slack acting as their ‘central nervous system’ for information flow, a filter was needed to separate the signal from the noise. And the native notification filters could still cause interesting and important messages to get overlooked.
That’s why he created the “ICYMI” bot, so that the team itself could decide which messages were important — by upvoting them at will, and contributing to the generation of a weekly digest of the top-voted messages.
“I don’t really want everyone in the general channel waiting around for the big next big announcement”, Prosser said, to explain the genesis of ICYMI.
“I want them to feel comfortable that it’s okay to miss it. That there’s a mechanism to catch back up again. Like in an office building, you might staple an announcement to the cork board”
Because the posts are upvoted by everyone, it yields a sense of what the team itself feels is unmissable, rather than the CEO making announcements with a megaphone.
Safe to get on and work
When everyone knows their accountability for maintaining communication does not depend on continually checking in with one channel, they can do their work in peace. “You really want to do everything you can to cut distraction factors, maximize focus factors, and being able to pull together a digest so that they’re never missing out on important things, this really increases a person’s ability to just dial in and be effective,” Prosser continued.
Keeping the world working through challenging times is about more than sending everybody home, and little tweaks like this can cut through the productivity black hole that endless watercooler chat can turn into, particularly when you combine the perfect storm of a large chatty team and fast moving global events raising anxiety levels. So the ICYMI bot for Slack sounds like a great solution for getting Slack back its place as an asynchronous communications tool instead of a continual flood of notifications, and creating trust within the team that the right information will make its way to the digest in good time.
