Here's What Happens When You Ignore 100 Slack Notifications In a Row

Get endless Slack notifications on top of all your other workplace messages?

How to manage Slack notifications without using Slack

Slack is not the only chat app out there. If you prefer another collaboration tool, you might be used to ignoring Slack notifications, or Slack altogether.

When businesses use more than one app - and let's face it, there's a lot to choose from - there are often repercussions.

97% of executives and employees believe that misalignment in a team negatively impacts the outcome of a task.

If team leaders assume all their employees are on Slack, they may not send the same information via email and other tools.

Familiar scenario?

Then messages being sent between teams could be going unread, leading to workplace silos and lost information.

Here's what can happen when team members in a Slack workspace aren't up-to-date with their messages.

Ignore 1 Slack notification - work gets duplicated

Imagine you set up a task for your marketing team.

Someone from marketing might comment on Slack, letting everyone else in that group know that the project is done.

That's great - unless some of your employees aren't checking their Slack notifications.

If you've got a handful of sales employees that dip into marketing projects, but prefer Microsoft Teams to Slack, they may get into the habit of ignoring their Slack messages completely.

This means they don't see when work gets done. The outcome? The same tasks are carried out elsewhere.

Having already been completed as part of the marketing project - that everybody is tracking in Slack.

Ineffective communication in your workforce may mean that crucial employees waste their time repeating tasks that are already done.

That means that you end up with a less productive and efficient.

Ignore 5 Slack notifications - deadlines are missed

The only thing worse than having the same task done twice is not having it done at all.

Clear communication is crucial when you're assigning projects to your team.

If you think that everyone you need to talk to about an upcoming task uses Slack, you'll likely post the details of the project in the relevant channel and leave your employees to it.

After all - you've got a lot of other things to deal with in your day-to-day schedule.

However, even one or two people ignoring Slack notifications means it's easy for deadlines to be missed.

Even if your employee has an account on your chosen chat tool, that doesn't mean they're paying attention to it.

They could be logged in and using another Slack workspace. They could be logged in but never check it.

It might even be the case that they have never even used it.

If you're not using the app that your team prefers, they’ll continue to use an alternative. Often, this comes with the ignoring of messages sent on other mediums.

Sometimes, it's not until you follow up on deadline day that you realize certain people haven't even started that project.

Ignore 10 Slack notifications - teams don't trust each other

Effective communication is crucial to teamwork.

The more you communicate, the easier sharing ideas, combining skills, and solving problems are.

That's why 75% of employers see collaboration as crucial to their team.

If your teams don't have the chance to communicate consistently, they won't build the relationships they need to trust each other.

This leads to an unhealthy competitive environment, where workers are constantly trying to "one-up" each other or withhold information.

Communication between different teams or sectors in your workplace can't be reserved exclusively for inter-office meetings.

People from all over the workplace need to be able to chat and build a rapport.

Enterprise chat tools like Slack facilitate this kind of cross-departmental communication.

However, for the most part, they're only effective if everyone is using the same app.

So, what if some of your team prefer to use Microsoft Teams or Webex Teams?

They won't even log into the tool that you want them to use.

This means that important messages get missed, and relationships between employees stagnate.  

Ignore 20 Slack notifications - everyone has different goals

Your people aren't on the same page.

When people can't effectively communicate, they can't get confirmation that they're on the right track by bouncing the ideas off other people.

This usually means that people end up with different priorities and different goals for the same project.

When everyone has their own vision of the "end product", and no-one is sharing that vision with each other, you end up with an undesirable outcome.

Rather than getting a single solution using the combined strength of your team, you end up with a mishmash of ideas.

Everything gets stitched together by people who clearly didn't collaborate.

The only way to improve the quality of your finished projects when they require teamwork is to ensure that the people working on a task can communicate properly.

Ignore 30 Slack notifications - nobody  knows where information is stored

If you assume that everyone is active on Slack, but they're missing Slack notifications, then you can face problems with your knowledge base too.

For instance, you might load all of your content up to a Dropbox folder and share it on Slack.

The people who use that app know where the information they need is, and how they can access it.

The rest of your team is left scrambling when they need data to complete a task.

Either your teams will make their own assumptions about how to deal with a project, or they'll waste time searching through countless folders looking for what they need.

Either way, you suffer from lost productivity and unreliable results.

Ignore 50 Slack notifications - creativity has diminished

Are your teams just going through the motions?

That's a sign that something's wrong with your communication.

When people from different backgrounds communicate and discuss ideas for the same projects, you get out-of-the-box thinking and new perspectives.

However, if all of the different segments in your workforce are working in silos, there's no cross-over.

If your marketing team is on Slack, your sales team is using email, and your executive team prefers Webex Teams, there's no overlap in discussions.

💥💥💥 Ignore 100 notifications and everything implodes - that awkward conversation in the hallway

The final straw.

If you've become that person that ignores Slack notifications, but thinks they are on top of their Microsoft Teams or Webex Teams chats, you could be in for a surprise.

"Well I use something else" is no longer an acceptable excuse for having missed the last 100+ Slack notifications.

Enough negativity.

The good news is fixing these issues just needs a way to sync the conversations between your teams.

The even better news is that you've started to address this reading this post.

How to overcome poor team communication

Businesses can't thrive without strong communication. Sometimes that means you need to use more than one app.

86% of executives and employees believe that workplace failures are caused by bad collaboration and knowledge gaps.

If you can eliminate the silos, you can empower your team to deliver better results.

However, that doesn't just mean demanding that all of your employees use Slack.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is accept that your team members might prefer different apps and find a way to bridge the gaps between each group.

The challenge?

Communicating with people that choose to use something different to you.

The solution?

Mio.

Mio syncs workplace chat tools to ensure that teams always have a single line of communication to keep them connected.

Check out how Mio keeps Slack users and Google Chat users connected in this video below.

With Mio, you can avoid duplicated work and preserve deadlines by ensuring employees can @Mention colleagues and direct message coworkers, regardless of the app they're using.

Messages and requests will be received across platform so nothing gets ignored or overlooked.

Everyone will be able to see where they need to go to access information.

Most importantly, you pull together all the different threads of conversations that are happening in your workplace, to create a central communication hub.

Here, your employees can collaborate, create, and get to know each other on a deeper level - cementing the bonds that lead to a stronger workforce.

Don't be a victim of poor communication. Don't worry about missing Slack notifications because you use Microsoft Teams or Webex Teams.

Keep your teams in sync, with Mio.