Talking Into the Void: Why Slack and Teams Still Miss the Point
Millions of us live inside Slack and Teams every day. But unless we change the culture around them, these tools will keep rewarding chatter instead of clarity.
Always-on, always connected… yet somehow still talking past each other.
Have you ever posted something in Slack—or Teams, or whatever it is your organization uses—and gotten no response? I don’t mean an argument. I mean just nothing. Zero replies. No emoji. It’s like shouting into an empty room.
And yet: you know people are there. In the company directory, they’re right there. You’ve seen them in the Zoom boxes all day long. They’re active. They’ve posted before. They are clearly online. And still… nothing.
It happened to me so many times that I started to suspect I was just expecting too much from these apps. Or maybe I wasn’t using them the right way.
Slack came out in 2014. Teams a few years later in 2017. They have colonized the contemporary workplace. Teams rules the roost in large organizations, primarily because it’s native to Microsoft 365. Slack came first in startups and among tech companies. Both now have hundreds of millions of daily active users.
The adoption is mind-boggling. The experience? Frequently sub-par. The very features that are designed to make us more efficient—channels, notifications, integrations—often serve only to fragment our attention further. Teams users log hours into the app. Slack users average one hour and 30 minutes of “active” time each day, but have the app open for nine. We’re never offline, but just because we’re always-on doesn’t mean we’re actually connecting.
The truth is this: the problem is not the software. It’s the culture we create around it. Most organizations make no decisions about how they want these tools to be used. They just get them up and running and hope for the best. And what you get is a kind of no-man’s land: too informal for important decisions, too “worky” for the informal, social chitchat it was supposed to supplant.
I see evidence of that cultural disconnect in three main areas:
The “Simple Stuff” Problem
Both Slack and Teams are great for the throwaway stuff. “Want coffee?” “Printer’s jammed again.” Both are also great for the personal stuff: the graduation photo, the mountain summit selfie, that sort of thing which elicits a stream of emojis. But the second you ask something that really matters—like “should we rethink our client onboarding?”—crickets.
The “Silence in the Crowd” Effect
I once posted in our newsroom Slack a request that someone, anyone, had a source they could share to help a colleague on a story. It’s exactly the kind of collective intelligence moment for which these tools were supposed to be so great.
Yet? Silence. Bupkis. Meanwhile, somebody’s photo of their lunch had half a dozen emoji reactions within minutes. People were online. They just weren’t present.
It’s as if we built digital water coolers, and then discovered nobody actually wants to have a real conversation there.
The “Look What I Found” Problem
Another big miss: how we share links. “I read this,” or “isn’t this cool?” with no context or explanation. The share itself isn’t the problem. It’s the complete absence of framing. Why is this worth my time? What should I take away? Without that, it’s just more white noise in a feed that’s already too noisy.
The irony is that organizations pay millions to use these tools, and yet what they actually make effortless are the lowest-stakes conversations. The ones that matter still happen elsewhere, or not at all. Which may explain why only 18% of employees say their communication skills are ever evaluated at work.
But here’s the good news: Slack and Teams work, if we approach them with intention. The difference is cultural, not technical. Here are some ways I’ve seen that actually make a difference:
Give channels a purpose
Most workplaces spin up channels like weeds. Without a purpose, they quickly become dumping grounds. Teams that make this work make it obvious: announcements go here, brainstorming there, decisions over there. You don’t have to think twice about what goes where.
Leaders go first
If leaders don’t show up, people won’t follow. And it doesn’t have to be a long post. A thumbs-up, a “got it,” a quick “circle back later.” Those little signals let people know: you heard me.
Use threads like your life depended on it
Without threads, important questions disappear in minutes. With them, everything related stays together. It’s the difference between being able to find the conversation later and pretending it never happened.
Don’t confuse chat with decisions
This might be the worst of the traps. Just because something was talked about in Slack doesn’t mean it was decided. Smart teams write down outcomes somewhere more permanent: a doc, a wiki, a project board. Chat is where the idea is hashed out. The record lives elsewhere.
Slow down
Slack and Teams train us to believe instant responses equal productivity. They don’t. Healthiest teams set an async rhythm: check a couple times a day, then walk away. Less stress. More clarity. And oddly enough, more engagement.
Collaboration is supposed to be two-way. Slack and Teams make it easier to go around, over, or under each other, or they can make it better. The difference isn’t in the tools themselves. It’s in how we choose to use them.
And when we get the culture right, the room doesn’t stay empty. It fills with the conversations that matter.
What’s the smartest—or strangest—thing you’ve seen a team do to make these tools more effective? Drop it in the comments.
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