You’d think it was weird if someone sat you down to show you how to use Slack, right? You already know how to type a message and hit send.
Except knowing how to send a message isn’t the same as knowing how this team uses Slack. Underneath the simple interface is an etiquette nobody ever agreed on.
Think about what happens when five people from five different cultures show up to the same birthday party. In one culture, you’d never dream of arriving without a gift. In another, the birthday person is expected to cook for everyone else. None of these are wrong. It just feels weird when someone behaves differently to what you’d expected.
A sales team’s Slack is that party every single day. Someone learned their communication habits over email, so their messages read like formal letters. Someone else arrives from a background where the group chat never stops, so they fire off a thought the second they have it, mid-sentence, three messages in a row, and the important team update you just posted scrolls into oblivion. Neither of them is being unprofessional or careless. Nobody ever agreed whose version the team is actually using, so both keep running at once. At this version of the party, you don’t get curious about someone’s culture, you just think they’re weird.
This is where most of the friction people blame on Slack actually comes from.
The next time someone on the team does something in Slack that feels off, wrong channel, wrong tone, wrong format, it’s worth pausing before reading it as carelessness.
It should be just as easy to spot these different habits as it is a birthday custom, and just as easy to agree, out loud, which one this particular team is running. Not a rulebook nobody reads. Just the version of “here’s how we do this here” that Slack doesn’t come with, and that almost nobody thinks to give.