The short version
- Keep six norms, not twenty. A long list is a document; a short list is a habit.
- Everything is urgent because nothing is labelled. Define urgent by consequence, in one sentence, and give it its own route.
- Norms are set by what senior people do, not by what the document says. One late-night reply from a manager overrides the whole page.
- Add one norm most lists miss: check what they wrote down before you ask.
Most teams have written channel norms somewhere and follow about a third of them. That is not a failure of will, it is a failure of quantity: a list of twenty conventions cannot be held in anyone's head while they are composing a message, so people fall back on habit.
"Everything is urgent because nothing is labelled."
Why norm lists fail
Three reasons. They are too long, so nobody internalises them. They describe etiquette rather than expectations, which means they tell you how to be polite but not how fast you owe a reply. And they are unenforced, because enforcing a norm means correcting a colleague, which most people avoid.
A norm list works when it is short enough to remember, specific enough to settle arguments, and modelled by the people everyone is watching. That last condition does more work than the other two combined.
The six norms
| Norm | Why it is on the list |
|---|---|
| One working day for a reply, in the recipient's zone | Removes the guesswork that drives constant checking |
| Channels over direct messages for work questions | Anyone can answer, and the answer stays useful |
| Whole question in one message | Stops the three-notification "hi, got a sec" pattern |
| Threads for anything with more than two replies | Makes the channel readable eight hours later |
| Outside someone's hours, schedule the send | Separates when you write from when they are asked |
| Check what they wrote down before you ask | Most questions have an answer already |
Six lines, in the channel topic, not in a handbook. If you want a seventh, remove one first.
Defining urgent in one sentence
Write it by consequence, not by feeling: urgent means customers are affected right now, or a deadline today fails without an answer within the hour. Everything else is important, and important things get answered in working hours.
Then give urgent its own route, which should not be the channel. A phone call or a page to the on-call person, and nothing else. The moment urgency lives in the same channel as everything else, the only way to signal it is tone, and tone inflates. Within a month "quick one" and "sorry to bother you" become urgency markers, which is how a team arrives at everything being urgent.
The first test of the definition is the first time a senior person's non-urgent request is treated as non-urgent. If it jumps the queue anyway, the definition is decorative.
The norm most lists miss
Every norm list governs how to ask. Almost none address whether to ask at all, so the default remains: uncertain about something, interrupt a person.
The sixth norm changes that default, and it only works if looking is genuinely faster than asking. That is a hard bar. Asking a colleague takes eleven seconds, so any alternative that takes two minutes loses, which is why "search the wiki first" never became a real norm anywhere.
With StandIn it clears the bar. Each person confirms a ninety-second brief at the end of their day, mostly drafted from work that already happened. While they are off, their StandIn answers questions from it in their words, with a source under every answer, clearly labelled, and never guessing: if the answer is not there, it says so and names who to ask. So "check what they wrote down before you ask" becomes a norm people keep for their own convenience rather than out of consideration. See how StandIn works.
How norms actually get enforced
Not by a document, and not by escalation. By three things, in this order of importance.
Senior people modelling them, especially the response-time one. A manager who replies at 23:00 has set the actual norm, whatever the topic says. Public gentle redirects, every time, for the first month: "moving this to the channel so others can see" costs nothing and teaches instantly. And a quarterly review that deletes a norm whenever it adds one, so the list stays short enough to be real.
If your team also spans time zones, pair this with the channel table in a communication plan for a team in three countries.
Common Questions
How many Slack norms should a team have?
About six, and they should fit in the channel topic. Beyond that, people stop being able to recall them while writing a message, which is the only moment a norm can be applied.
Where should channel norms be written?
In the channel topic or description, where they are visible at the moment of use, plus one line in onboarding. A page in a handbook is read once and never consulted again.
How do we stop urgency inflation?
Define urgent by consequence in one sentence, give it a route that is not the channel, and hold the definition the first time a senior person tests it. Urgency inflates when the only way to signal priority is wording.
Is it rude not to reply immediately?
Only if the team has never said what the expectation is. Once one working day is published and visibly used, replying the next morning is normal and nobody reads it as being deprioritised.
When you're off, your StandIn is on.
It answers your teammates' questions from work you've already done, in your words, with a source under every answer.