Every organization has their own norms and levels or organization when using slack. Here are a few norms to help your organization.

Norms on this Slack

Publish your slack norms (document similar to this post), in a canvas document in a main channel.

• Before using @here know how many people are in the channel, see if there’s a team/audience specific slack handle first instead of letting everyone
• Unfurled links take up a lot space, consider removing the unfurl while retaining the link
• Use the Slack channel naming conventions
• Make channels public, unless they need to be private
• Mind your slack, every quarter e.g., archive, leave channels

Slack Map

The slack map is meant to make people joining your slack become aware faster. Some areas that you could list:

• Teams
• Incident Response
• Admin/Meetings/Process
• Deploys & Alerts
• Hobby/Social

Naming Slack Channels

• Use proj- for project channels
• Use temp- for ephemeral conversations
• Use rdm- for non-work fun channels
• Use team-teamname team public channels
• Use team-teamname-pvt- for team private channels
• Use incident-dd-mm-yyyy-incidentname- for technology incidents
• Use - dashes instead of _ underscores to name channels

Hat tip to Brett Bernstein for the additional naming conventions