Hey there, I'm Devin!
Most of the time you can catch me deep in the world of internal comms at Workshop (yes, the Happy Mondays folks!), and while I love AI, there are just some comms questions that need a human who really gets it… that’s me!
Hey Devin — I’ve got senior leaders (Senior Directors and up) who are split on how they want to receive communication, mainly Slack versus email. The people who dislike Slack really dislike it, and vice versa. For context: we recently closed our end-of-year process, and I got feedback that Slack messages in our People Leaders channel were missed. Then another group said we should send everything over email and Slack. But we purposely streamlined this year to one email a month plus just-in-time resources via Slack, because last year’s feedback was that leaders felt overloaded. This year we even threaded each message to previous ones and built in an AI agent to help search resources. So: how do I cater to both groups?
Alright! First and foremost, this is a hard one, and I don’t want to gloss over that at all. You did the thoughtful thing (streamlined intentionally, threaded your messages, even built in an AI agent), and the result was… conflicting feedback pulling you in two directions at once. That’s not a sign you got it wrong. That’s just what it feels like to communicate to a group of humans with genuinely different preferences. I am sure many internal communicators can relate!
So before you go anywhere near “let’s just send everything twice,” I’d get curious about what’s actually underneath the dislike. Because “I don’t like Slack” (or email) is almost never really about the channel. Is it frequency? Accessibility, like they can’t find things later? Formatting, where a dense message is hard to scan? My hunch is that a lot of the aversion comes down to something simpler: the channel just doesn’t feel like a meaningful part of their workday… yet! It’s easy to dislike a tool you haven’t quite folded into how you work. So dig into the why before you change the what, because the fix for “I keep missing things” is very different from the fix for “I find this overwhelming.”
On the missed Slack messages specifically: I’d look at whether that’s a channel problem or an importance problem. If the end-of-year stuff was genuinely must-read and it lived only in Slack, that’s less “Slack doesn’t work” and more “the most critical thing needed to land somewhere unmissable.” Not every message deserves that treatment, but the few that truly do might warrant showing up in both places.
Which brings me to cross-posting, because it’s a nice middle path that isn’t the same as doubling your workload or re-overloading everyone. With the right tool, you can post one message to both Slack and email, adjusting the formatting so each version actually fits the channel (a scannable email, a tighter/easy-to-digest Slack version). That’s different from blasting identical copy everywhere twice. You’re meeting people where they already are, without abandoning the streamlined plan you built.
And here’s the piece I’d encourage you to hold onto most: give your strategy room to breathe. You just rolled this out!! One round of feedback isn’t enough to tell you whether the plan works, it’s enough to tell you the plan is new. I’d commit to it for another few months, keep collecting feedback (ideally the why behind the preferences, not just the preference), and then pivot with real information instead of reacting to the loudest voices in the immediate aftermath. Some of that friction is just the sound of people adjusting to a change.
You clearly put a ton of intention into this. Don’t let a couple of rough data points sway you away from a really solid plan before it’s had a fair shot.
