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Warm Handoffs

Warm Handoffs are a procedure I’ve implemented with several teams and organizations to improve communication and collaboration in Slack. As organizations grow and ownership shifts and splits as teams are formed and re-formed, Slack channels proliferate, and it gets harder for folks across an org to know the right channel to get help for a particular problem. This often leads to someone asking a question of the team they think is right then being redirected to another team and channel (sometimes more than once).

Whether redirects are driven by a desire to get someone to the right place or a “not my job” mentality, they subtely contribute to a siloed “us vs. them” culture, and over time reduce collaboration and cohesiveness between teams. While pulling in the right folks is an improvement over a redirect, it reinforces asking for help in the wrong channel, and mean that other members of the owning team don’t see the questions or issues their users have. Due to the emotionally exhausting experience, all the valuable information about how the rate limiting worked was lost, as Gina provided the most succinct solution, and Miles left the conversation entirely.

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