The rules of Slack communication in the workplace

The rules of Slack communication in the workplaceThe rules of Slack communication in the workplaceTeam messaging apps have, for several years, brought ingestaltal text messaging into the workplace Slack messages, Facebook Messenger, and Gchat have all become replacements for email, allowing colleagues to communicate with their teams without having to speak out loud very often.Then why do we still misunderstand each other all the time?Thanks. Thank you. Thx. TY. TaWeve seen colleagues give each other the cold shoulder for days because of a too-formal punctuation mark in a Gchat message or an errant GIF in Slack. And never mind the difficulty in interpreting jokes.Welcome to the new era of emojis, no periods and thxinstead of thank you between your request for project deadlines.As a millennial who has worked on all of behauptung platforms, I have witnessed firsthand how tone can be misconstrued between millennials used to texting informally and older generations who have been trained t o always use proper punctuation in work emails.We overcompensate cheeriness at workWhen you cant see the person on the other side of your screen, its harder to interpret feelings, and there are usually no easy answers. One popular corrective many people use is to overcompensate with friendliness, piling on exclamation points and smiley faces.But even that gets complicated Was tacking on thatsmiley face emoji after a work request cheerful or passive aggressive? It can be both Allow me to be your millennial soothsayer on this translation journey down into what gestures can be misconstrued and how you can avoid them.Periods are aggressivePeriods carry a stern finality in instant messenger communications. If you want to communicate well across generations in the workplace, drop your periods. They are the equivalent of too-formal text messages from your parents that start with Dear son and end, Sincerely, Mama.In text message bubbles, you already know when the sentence has come to an end , so you dont need the full stop of a period. Adding a periodin behauptung cases can seem excessive, and even aggressive.In a 2016 study, researchers found that university students rated texts that ended with periods as less sincere than those that ended without one. Periods in text messages can even be interpreted as being a jerk.In Slack messages, I find periods can aggressively signal that the conversation is not just over, but OVER.As an example When your boss asks for one more task, you can reply fine, or fine. The former is a happy-go-lucky shrug of whatever. The latter indicates youre angry or annoyed.A quick guide to working with millennials the more formal the language they use, the more they are telegraphing keeping you at arms length. In emails, I still button myself up informal language, but in my professional Slacks and Gchats, the more informal I am, the more comfortable I am around you.When in doubt, use a thumbs upPictograms were the earliest form of human communicat ion for a reason. Emojis provide useful aids to make your language clearer - particularly emotions.As linguist Gretchen McCullough explained, emoji are more like gesture than language. When you crunch the numbers, the face, hand, and heart emoji are by far the most popular.Indicating neutral agreement can be fraught when punctuation and truncated syntax- k, kay, kk- is loaded and ambiguous online. I once had a fellow millennial colleagueask if my tersek meant that I was less than enthusiastic about completing a request. This was in a job wherethe majority of editorialdebatesand professionalcommunication happened overFacebook messenger, so tone was hard to read.After that, I tried sprinkling my instant messenger communications with more exclamation points, but its loudness felt performative and forced K Ok Okay Im so grateful to be alive to create this productSince then, I have become a defendant of using the thumbs-up emoji over using any version of okay when it comes to signaling agreement. I use the praise-hands emoji to indicate louder agreement. When I need to be clearly understood, I supplementmy meaning with unambiguous gestures.Dont use GIFs if youre a beginnerGIFs- short looping videos that are integrated into these instant messenger platforms- are an advanced tutorial that we would need a whole semester to cover.GIFs represent emotions even more strongly than emoji do. If youre a beginner, I would avoid using gifs. In GIFs, youre using other peoples emotions to indicate your own, and you dont want your colleagues to wonder what you mean by your Michael Jackson eating popcorn GIF.https//giphy.com/gifs/michael-jackson-watching-popcorn-ftXvsSyRzKXXGThese are just a few basic tips I have learned through trial and error. Instant messenger platforms have afforded us the nimblenessto communicate at a moments notice, but they have also opened Pandoras box of ambiguous nuance and words that have been changed by memes. Until were all projecting our communic ations into each others minds through the Cloud, well need to remainthoughtful about how we communicate that we are ok online. U mad?