These are your coworkers’ best friends, who send you an email and then immediately run to your desk to tell you that they sent you an email. And if you’re busy, they stare at you until you turn to them and they get what they want, no matter what you were doing.
Sorry but no. If it’s asynchronous and I don’t need a response in a short time, I’ll email you. If I say something on Slack to a person, and don’t get a response in a short timeframe (~5 minutes), I go to someone else - whether that’s a coworker or a manager. And when I get told, “you’ll have to ask [unresponsive]”, I say, “Oh, I tried to reach out to them, they didn’t respond. Can you reach out and see if they’re available?”
That way, I’ve gotten somewhere closer to my answer, and I’ve put another person on the scent of the unresponsive one.
Don’t expect people to make themselves available to you without telling them what for. “I reached out” is a shitty phrase for “I expected them to drop everything but I didn’t explain why or what the problem is and for some reason I’m blaming them for no progress happening. I tried prodding my colleagues silently with literally no information whatsoever and now I’m all out of options. Please can management intervene, because telling my colleagues absolutely nothing about what needs to be done isn’t working - for some reason they’re not doing anything. I act like my urgent work problem is utterly meaningless content-free chit-chat and then get butthurt when people don’t respond to it. Management needs to make sure all my colleagues always drop everything for me instantly on my say so without hesitation or any context because otherwise they’re unhelpful. Please tell my colleagues that ‘hi’ from me means it’s AN EMERGENCY WHICH MUST BE HANDLED IMMEDIATELY.”
You sound like an awful person to work with. I’m not gonna break my focus and check the chat every 5 minutes so that I can serve your majesty’s questions.
Anything that I care about enough for that is related to one of four things:
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Broken tech.
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Software or systems insufficient to the need, which stand in the way of either operations or profit (usually both).
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Directly involved with vendor or client ops, and needs to be fixed for operations to continue.
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Billing problems for clients or vendors which I cannot resolve on my own.
Everything else, I can send an email or ask in a channel, rather than a private IM.
How on earth are your colleagues supposed to know this from “hi”?! If there really is an urgent problem, actually say what it is. Why do you expect all your colleagues to deduce that ‘hi’ means “production is currently shut down, please help immediately”?
DON’T just say hi. Say what the problem is. Just saying ‘hi’ shows no respect whatsoever for your colleagues’ time management.
No, don’t you see? He’s a very important bigshot and everyone must drop whatever they’re doing to service him immediately.
These are not simple questions but high severity issues that need to be dealt with in a short timeframe. Slack is not the right tool here, a dedicated process would work much better (like an incident system).
That being said, the point here is to include enough context in your initial message so that the other person can start thinking about it as soon as they see it, instead of having to wait for you to type it out.
This company desperately needs a ticketing system. I can’t imagine getting interrupted by some entitled asshole who doesn’t realize i don’t exist to serve only them.
To people like this, my existence begins and ends with their call, those kind of people get shit work done for them and everyone talks about them behind their back.
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But what did you say in the first place? Did you state the problem? If not, “Slack” describes your brain.
I do that with my friends out of habit sometimes
Hi!
…?
I work in municipal government and had a enginee4ing consultant Teams me a comment about a developer being a bumbass while I was screen-sharing to a live public meeting that involved that developer.
Please give me the “hey”
I think you can hide message previews now, but dang lol.
I always have mine set to “do not disturb when screen sharing” and it works flawlessly for internal meetings. As soon as I have an external meeting though… I have to manually enable the do not disturb when joining a meeting set up by someone outside my company.
Need to look into disabling the previews, that should hopefully fix it
Don’t ever share your main desktop. Share individual windows or a secondary monitor.
I’ve managed to (for better or worse) make myself fairly irreplaceable at my job and am in a rare position where I can refuse to use anything I choose and there’s no-one who can make me.
Windows and Teams are top of my “Fuck you” list.I feel for the people who don’t have that luxury though.
You wouldn’t write a letter that’s just “Hi <name>” and then no body. You’d have the greeting, the content, and the signoff. The same applies to Slack, Teams, and the like. You can omit the greeting & signoff or keep them in, but you can’t omit the content!
If you do, I’ll wait until the next day or so, and if I remember I’ll reply that they seem to have forgotten to include a message before hitting “send”.
If you want to say hi, start your message with it as a single message.
What if I want them to take a moment to mentally prepare for the bullshit I’m about to drop on their lap?
“Hey, so I have this… <insert bullshit here>”
The same morons also say hi to ChatGPT. They can’t help it.
If I was trying to use ChatGPT I would say “hi” before explaining my whole deal for five minutes because I don’t want to hear “API Limit Exceeded, Buy More ChatGPT”.
Of course, I would never.
I’ve toyed with this a few ways, and my favorite response is waiting 4 hours and replying “hi!” That might mean the next day. Then when they ask the question, wait a couple more hours at least to reply. They’ve set the pace for the conversation this way, and it’s going to be glacial. (Folks who have no urgency get no urgency)
If they ask the right way, I am pretty quick. (Polite people get polite responses)
If it’s something that can wait 20 minutes, I typically wait 20 minutes. (I am a busy person) (Protip: this makes bosses and coworkers think you’re not just fucking around all day, and they respect you more)
Train people using rules, even if they are unspoken, be consistent and it’ll work.
Nah, hi back just before you knock off. As in send hi, log out, go home.
Just reply “hi” then set your status to away and go grab a coffee!
Just saying “Hi” back five minutes later already throws them off and they’ll come back to you the next day.
Oh yeah. Never say “hi” back right away! Always wait at least 5 minutes!
This is a hill I will die on with you. I’ve even sent the “no hello” link to a particularly egregious offender.
We had a communication training at my work that told us to always start with a Hi before asking the question on teams. It was infuriating
I just ignore it.
Me too, but some fraction of the total damage still comes through.
