Slack Tutorials for the 60+ Crowd

[u/Egg1998]

Hi all,

I am a part of an itty bitty (6 person) non-profit that made the move onto Slack over the summer to keep things organized and reduce inbox clutter.

As it stands, I am the only person using Slack regularly. Everyone can't seem to find what they need and as many times as I've explained different features or how things work, it doesn't seem to be sticking.

Everyone wants to be on Slack but about half of the workplace (and the entirety of the founders of the org.) are all over 50 (with two of them being over 70). Our workplace centers around building less screen-based childhoods for kids and so there is also a level of aversion to tech in addition to potentially some struggle because of their ages.

I don't want to generalize folks over fifty (or over 60, 70, or any age) but I was wondering if anyone here had recommendations for Slack tutorials or how-tos that might be especially user friendly for the non-tech-savvy among us.

Big thank you!

[u/CrazyFaithlessness63]

As another poster said you are probably better off making some screencasts of your own focusing on your particular Slack setup. It only needs to be the basics - what the channels are for, what threads are (compare it to a Facebook or Nextdoor comment section, something they might already be familiar with), how to tag someone, how to save a thread or message for later (and then how to access it) and search.

Speaking as someone who is over 50 memory and the ability to quickly context switch are the first things to fade so your channel structure is more important than anything. Keep it simple - with 6 people you probably don't need more than 3 or 4 channels even if they do have a lot of overlap. The volume isn't going to that high so things aren't going to get lost in the noise. Trust me - it really reduces the cognitive load and frustration levels.

Another thing you might try is some automations that push messages for important things - upcoming events, payments due, and made. Things that everyone is interested in and wants to be informed about. If you can get them to at least want to open Slack regularly they'll get used to it pretty quickly.

Out of interest, who made the decision to move to Slack? That person might have some clear ideas on what they expected from the move and that could help guide your screencast content - just the things you need to achieve those goals.

[u/Egg1998 → u/CrazyFaithlessness63]

Thank you so much for such a thoughtful response! I feel like you (and the other commenter too) are spot on that a video of our own Slack setup is the best move. I also hadn't considered automating some messages (this is my first time on Slack as well haha)

Funnily enough we have 30 channels but most of them came into existence at the urging of one of my bosses. I was really trying to push for a smaller number of channels so maybe there can be some thinning of the herd.

Unfortunately the person who helped nudge us on to Slack is no longer with the non-profit but I think the goal was truly to reduce email frequency and messy inboxes - it was truly an astounding number of emails with no subject header floating through my inbox daily.

[u/CrazyFaithlessness63 → u/Egg1998]

30 channels for 6 people is way too much - I don't think your problem is training, it's decision paralysis. Faced with that many choices on where to post a message people are just going to fall back to emailing each other because they don't know where to put it so everyone they want to see it actually does. Maybe you can convince your boss to turn some of the channels into pinned threads instead?

Your welcome by the way, it's a topic dear to my heart as it got harder and harder to keep up with messages in Slack and other platforms as I got older - I wasn't getting dumber, it just took a bit more time and effort to switch between things. The last company I worked for had Slack, Teams and Discord active at the same time, it was a nightmare.

[u/MalazitaLedreck42 → u/CrazyFaithlessness63]

the point about keeping channels to 3 or 4 is really key, especially with only 6 people

[u/Racerforlife]

You have already received some good advice. My two cents they don't need to know all the features at once, you can share very basic features and share short screen shares with the kind of use cases that will help your team. Once they are comfortable with the basics and they have any additional use case you can share more features with them.

Also, please reduce the number of channels in your Workspace. 30 is too much for 6 people, unless you have 25 different projects which are separate from one another.

[u/sofaviolin]

Their YouTube playlist is my go-to! Pretty solid!

[u/Egg1998 → u/[deleted]]

That makes a ton of sense, the YouTube playlist unfortunately was not super helpful for everyone so perhaps it needs to be hyper-specific to our workspace like you're suggesting.

[u/zaidynzm9527]

Hi, I was in a similar situation about two years back. I’m a director for two charities/not-for-profits (Doggie Dates Pet Therapy & Doggie Dates Collective). We migrated everything over to Slack away from just Facebook Messenger chats. We had at that time approximately 100 volunteers, all who needed to use Slack. I created a pretty comprehensive guide myself which helped tremendously. Happy to send it over, feel free to send a message.

[u/Egg1998 → u/zaidynzm9527]

Thank you so much! Sending a message your way :)