Find Office Secrets in Your New Job on Slack
When you join a new job, there is a lot to learn besides formal orientation. You need to figure out your unspoken responsibilities, relationships between people and departments, and some office gossip. If your workplace uses the Slack chat app, you can get most of this information by searching the archives. You don’t have time to read everything you’ve written, so here’s how to find your most important (and naughty) content.
You don’t need to go as far as the aggressive new employee described in the New York Times:
There was a guy who spoke about an ambitious new employee at his firm who spent his first weeks browsing thousands of Slack magazines dating back long before he joined. “He has encyclopedic knowledge about why certain decisions were made and about all personnel events that have occurred,” the employee said. “Every little interpersonal spat. Every interview we’ve ever done! “
Just a couple of hours of searching scattered throughout your first week or two can help you get your bearings. You can either leave your research in Slack or use it to get started right away when you talk to your new colleagues face-to-face: “Hey, I saw everyone discussing the Florida retreat last month. Nobody told me about it. I need to know? “
How to search
You can start searching in the upper right corner of the Slack window or by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-F ( Cmd-F on Mac). Slack will suggest some auto-filled terms as you type.
After you hit Enter, your results page will include a right-hand column with powerful filtering options. You can select specific search channels or messages from specific people. You can also search only channels you are a member of or all public channels. You can enable or disable automatic messages from apps and bots, and you can also specify a date range. You can combine any of these filters, for example everything your boss said about “billing” in a particular channel in 2018.
You may not see other people’s direct messages or private channels that you are not a member of, but you can find out a little about how many people are talking in private as you will find out below.
Find these three most important people
The very first thing to do is find your own name in case someone discussed you before you joined. You will be mentioned much more often, so look for it now before the results are cluttered.
Second, find the name of the person you are replacing . Look at which channels they spent their time on and which other channels were talked about. If you don’t work with idiots, you won’t find much gossip. But if the channels you want are publicly available, you can see if another department handled your predecessor’s internal requests frequently or if their work was discussed throughout the organization. This can help you understand the privileges and responsibilities of your role.
Third, look for your boss’s name and messages . Also look for your boss’ boss , specifically what messages they send – it’s good to know what the boss cares about, or even if they use Slack.
Examine your real job
Search for any keywords related to your job function . You will see the difference between how your work was described in the adaptation process and how it actually fails. And if you’re not sure if some of your orientation or introductory documentation will be up-to-date, search Slack as well.
Search for your department name to get a better understanding of how your department interacts with others and how often it is mentioned. If you see a lot of results from certain channels or from certain people, focus on filtering only on those channels.
View important channels and messages
You will, of course, read the recent archive of your department’s main channels . Also read a little in the public chat . Your organization might use default channels like #random and #announcements, or it might have custom channels. These can change over time, so make sure someone invites you to the current channels that everyone is using.
Read the archives of all ad type channels that have infrequent posts. It is an effective way to find critical milestones and turning points. You can select some of them for further study.
On your most important channels, check your year-old chat logs to see if there are any yearly issues that are coming up again in the near future, such as conferences, holiday schedules, or tax time. You can enter dates in the search bar – “after: 2018-06-23 to: 2018-07-01 in: #sales_dept” – or use the calendar picker in the filters menu.
And read pinned posts on every channel you join. When you have a channel open, click the (i) icon in the upper right corner to open the About channel sidebar. This sidebar has a Pinned Items section for posts that someone has deliberately highlighted.
The About sidebar also has a Highlights section for posts that Slack thinks might be important (due to the large number of replies or because they contain “@here” or “@channel “).
Search all of your main @here and @channel channels, plus “forget” or “all.”
Assorted searches
If you have more time, these searches can help you understand some of the benefits, warnings, culture, and common challenges. Look for words like:
- “Broken” or “can’t find” or “I never can” or “still haven’t found” or “a few days ago” (for problems that need to be foreseen or solved)
- “Login” or “our account” or “access” or “username” and “password” (to find your company’s account information and see what services it is connected to, such as Salesforce, MailChimp, Google Analytics or LexisNexis)
- “I hate” or “love” (filter only more serious work-related channels)
- “Shit” or “disaster” or “rout”
- “Benefit” or “bonus”, “vacation” or “day off”
- “Layoffs”, “layoffs”, “layoffs” or “unionization”
Search for channels to join
In the main chat interface, click on Channels (in the channel list on the left menu) to see all the public channels in your organization’s Slack. Sort by “Members (largest to smallest)” to quickly join the most popular channels. Sort by Created Date (Newest First) to see rooms that people have recently added.
You should also ask a few colleagues if there are any popular private channels . For example, at G / O Media, the parent company of Lifehacker, only certain people can create public Slack channels, but we can all create private channels. So the channels for tea lovers, cats, ghost stories, bad tweets, worst tweets, puns and spoilers from The Good Place are private.
Or go to https: // YOURSLACKNAME .slack.com / stats # feeds to sort feeds by a few more metrics, including the number of people posted in the last 30 days or since the feed was created. Sort by “Changes to Members who Posted” to see which channels have become much more active lately. These will be popular channels, mostly dead ones, that someone recently posted.
Spy on the whole team
You can see who on your team works the most with Slack if your Slack admins haven’t messed up the defaults. Go to https: // YOURSLACKNAME .slack.com / stats # members to see a list of members, which can then be sorted by “Messages Sent”. It’s a little crazy that Slack lets anyone see it! Remember, this is not word counting and is influenced by someone’s communication style: if your boss likes to hit the Enter key after every pair of words, he will appear higher in this list.
You can see a graph of Slack activity over time and how much of it is happening privately at https: // YOURSLACKNAME .slack.com / stats. You can see that all of the real conversation (or time-killing banter) is happening somewhere you can’t see. Better invite to private chats.