[volfied]

I work for a big company (F500), and one thing that always bothers me is the out of nowhere Slack messages that are three paragraphs long, by someone I have never met within the company. If I start helping them right away, they are happy to keep me online for the next hour while my flow is gone, god knows where.

I am trying to find the nicest way to say: "This should be an e-mail conversation, please send email.", but I wish I could somehow start an email draft that is saved and shows up in some to-do list somewhere.

[lightbendover]

Create an intake queue and direct them to that. Service it on a stated SLA that you decide. Do not respond directly to ad hoc requests (outside of perhaps company wide campaigns that you are in risk of missing).

[xyzzy123]

This is all incredibly difficult in a large company.

The intake queues suck because _some_ teams respond to Service Now and some don't. Like, you'll have a pretty easy task which requires stuff from 3 teams, 1 you put in the ticket and they do it same day, the other sits there and never gets picked up, for the third you can't even figure out which team is supposed to do it let alone how you would contact them. So, the hunt begins, and this requires talking to actual humans. Sometimes there are 2 or more teams who could do your thing in different ways but none of them want to.

This is made worse by some parts of the company on webex, some on slack, some only available on teams, some teams responsive to email and others not really etc.

The only thing that makes the whole engine work is an informal network of people that trust each other who glue the whole thing together behind the scenes.

The OP's problem is that large company communication is universally dysfunctional and the "glue" network between them and the people who need things from them is not strong enough. It helps to have a strong informal networker in the reporting chain. This is usually some kind of team lead and everyone accepts that their productivity will be destroyed because "everyone knows who they are" and contacts them out of the blue with their wacky requests. They should then prioritise and route appropriately.

If leaders are not amenable or functional in this way they get routed around and "person you contact to get things done" increasingly diverges from formal leadership.

IMHO, a keen eye for how the organisation actually functions, careful relationship management and knowing which levers and channels to use to get things done are the skills of a 10x person in enterprise.

[lightbendover]

Your response is exactly why artificial boundaries should be set up. Most of these requests will not be important and they should either be dissuaded entirely or dealt with much later. The ones that are important (note: very infrequent) will be in the hands of someone capable of navigating internal politics despite the existence of a "stop bothering me" canned response.

Every team I work with (very large company) leverages this approach, their productivity would be Nil if they left a direct channel wide open. Back channels exist only where they should exist.

[tra3]

Are you saying Inter-team coms in a large organization should be discouraged? Apologies if I misunderstood your post.

[kshacker]

I actually prefer 3 para slack messages rather than 5 messages: "Hi", "you there", "needed to discuss something", "ping me when you are online", "talk to you soon" because I enable notifications and this junk keeps on notifying - only some people.

[MattGaiser]

https://nohello.net/

[lazybreather]

Work force from India here. There are a lot of companies where whatsapp works as a communication medium. Apart from email, slack etc. It is taken for granted that team is available on personal communication channels and can be bombarded with messages anytime of the day. Right now I am on about 6 work related whatsapp groups. And this is pretty pretty common that we don't even realize that it is a problem. For all the moaning about 'westernization of culture' I seriously wish they pick this one leaf to realize how the world outside is and how it would help personal lives.

[sgrove]

Seems like it'd be nice to have a bot that you could add, so you could click a button on the message and respond, "Hey, would you mind giving me your email and I'll follow up on this as soon as I get a few minutes?", and then when they respond, have it create an email draft with the previous message quoted and with their email pre-filled.

A nice in-the-middle solution that a number of people might appreciate!

[jugg1es]

I feel like we are living the same life. If you are in the MD/DC/VA area, lets be friends.

[jimbokun]

> "This should be an e-mail conversation, please send email."

Or the classic "Open a ticket."