Etiquette in Workspace Collaboration Tools

These are a set of guidelines that helps everyone to play nice and fair while communicating especially on mediums like Slack, Teams or Mattermost be it at your workplace or other online communities.

Remember, while we are communicating over these mediums, neither our body language nor our voice is heard by other individuals who are reading our messages. This requires us to put in an effort while writing replies or initiating new conversations.

Direct vs Indirect Messages

Always try to avoid direct usage of english. They might find your directness rude and possibly offensive. By adjusting your tone, you are more likely to get a positive response from your reader.

Consider these:

• Direct – You are doing it wrong.
• Indirect and polite – The way it is being done might not be the right way. Do you mind checking it once?

• Direct – You are using a non standard practice. You need to follow the steps as documented.
• Indirect – I’m afraid that what is being followed might not be the standard practice. It will be beneficial to follow the steps as documented.

• Direct – It’s a bad idea
• Indirect – To be honest, I’m not sure if that would be a good idea.

We instead of You

Try to avoid the usage of “you” and substitute that with “we”. It can create wonders. The moment we use “we”, it becomes an inclusive conversation and the team feeling is higher and collaboration increases.

Consider these:

• You – You need to look into the logs and figure out.
• We – We need to look into the logs and figure out.

• You – You have to request for it with another team. Raise a JIRA ticket.
• We – We have to request for it with another team. Please raise a JIRA ticket.

And instead of But

Avoid the usage of “but” and substitute that with “and”. Try it out and see how the negative connotation of “but” just disappears.

Consider this:

• But – The logs are placed in a directory but you need to browse to the path to get the details.
• And – The logs are placed in a directory and we need to browse to the path to get the details.

Complete and Simple

Write complete and simple sentences.
Do not pollute the conversation thread with one liners one after the other.
It is not an ideal situation for the reader to get 10 notifications on his phone for every line you type and press enter. Instead send a single message with multiple lines and complete sentences.

Basic English Rules

Be very careful of capital letters, punctuation, spelling and basic grammar.

Nothing is more unpleasant than getting a reply which requires the reader to read multiple times to figure out where the sentence starts and ends along with multiple grammatical and spelling mistakes.