There are certain social media rules we can all agree on: Ghosting a conversation is impolite, and replying “k” to a text is the equivalent of a backhand slap (violent, wrong, and rude). But what about the rest of the rules? When can we really remind someone of our old Venmo request? What happens when someone tries to flirt with you on LinkedIn? Fortunately, terminally online writers Delia Cai and Steffi Cao are here to answer all your digital quandaries, big or small. Welcome to Fast Company ’s new advice column, Posting Playbook .
This week, Delia Cai tackles your biggest questions about Slack etiquette at work. My coworker keeps DMing me political content on the company Slack. How do I politely ask them to stop? Straight to the DMs? That is aggressive—but then again, it’s not so different from getting cornered in the breakroom by an overly enthusiastic colleague who’s on their third trip to the Keurig.
Think of these DMs as the new equivalent of those run-ins. Now, in the age of remote work (and Slack, which, for the better part of the last decade, has reliably turned even in-office days into a matter of messaging quietly at your desk), unwanted DMs from your coworkers are part and parcel of modern workplace dynamics. But unlike our corporate forebears, who got sucked into unwanted conversations more often than any Greg Daniels-inflected fantasy would want us to remember, we at least have the luxury of ignoring such overtures.
What I’m saying is that you can most certainly ignore these DMs; if for any reason this colleague bugs you about them (either in another message or in real life), all you have to do is fib about how busy this quarter is. (Really, that’s the secret to adult life, to be honest). There’s no polite way to ask someone “please stop sending me things,” but you can ask for a little redirection, especially if you can’t afford to jeopardize this coworker relationship.
The next time they drop those links in, you could also express a smidge of rote appreciation (“thanks for these!”) and then ask if they wouldn’t mind sharing such links to a personal email address, or to save them for discussion over lunch. My guess is that this coworker is probably bored and lonely and could really use some IRL connection—whether to discuss political issues or not. And I can’t totally blame them! The pre-COVID-19 workplace always had its issues, of course, but going into an office and interacting with colleagues was once a critical pillar of our social lives.
Now that non-work part of work has largely gone the way of “Casual Fridays” and pizza lunches; getting the agenda items done has become a more efficient and digitized affair, but we are losing a traditional source of socialization every time we’re choosing to log on from home. It’s making all of us lonelier . I’m betting your coworker is trying to strike up small talk or a modicum of connection in sharing this content with you; at the very least, they’re trying to be helpful.
That isn’t to say you’re required to engage with that content itself—maybe you could offer to get coffee together, where you then gently steer the actual conversation to something that’s a little more low-stakes. Alternately, you could also fully dive in and stir up some heated discourse between the two of you! Arguing over politics with your coworkers used to be a sacred ancient tradition! We used to live in a society! Is it rude to pass up the invitations to join social channels in the company Slack? I wanted to pair these questions together because my advice is more or less the same: No, it’s not rude to ignore stuff online—in fact, that’s pretty much the only coping mechanism we have at our disposal while juggling our various timeline hellscapes—but consider the intent here. It’s true that social channels on the company Slack can be extremely uncool and lackluster spaces, but it’s also true that those social channels are the only substitutes we have for “office culture” anymore.
Trust me, I’m the last person who wants to over-exaggerate the importance of putting in face-time at the office, and I’m the last millennial who would ever want someone to confuse a single ping pong table for, like, actual worker benefits. But if you think about office culture as a constellation of relationships that affect the quality of roughly eight hours of your day, every day, isn’t that constellation worth investing in, even if it’s through a not-exactly-sexy social channel on Slack? There’s no doubt about the conveniences that Slack and WFH have afforded a growing population, especially in post-COVID-19 years (and especially for working parents !); there’s also an increasing consensus internationally that employees deserve some kind of “right to disconnect” from all those work emails and pings. We’re setting better boundaries overall with the companies we work for, and that’s absolutely a net positive.
But the trade-off is a modern workplace that can also feel much more isolating, and whoever at the company set up that #doglovers or #bookclub channel at the Slack is trying to do something about it. It couldn’t hurt to join and at least say hi. You can always always hit “mute” later.
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