Chat tools are excellent at moving information and terrible at keeping it. A decision made in a thread on Tuesday is effectively gone by Friday, and the person who joins in March has no way to find it.
Most organisations respond by adding more channels, which makes it worse. The fix is structure and a small number of conventions people can actually remember.
- A channel architecture with a clear naming convention and an obvious answer to “where does this go” — plus an archiving habit, because dead channels are noise.
- A line between chat and record. Discussion happens in chat; decisions, processes and reference material get written somewhere durable. We set up the somewhere and the habit of moving things there.
- An intranet or workspace home for the things everyone needs: policies, forms, who to ask, what’s happening, how to do the common tasks.
- Onboarding paths so a new starter has a guided route through it rather than a link dump on day one.
- Internal comms flows — announcements, recognition, updates from leadership — with a predictable rhythm and place.
- Integrations that bring the useful signals in (deployments, tickets, approvals) and keep the rest out.
We’re deliberately conservative about notifications here. Every automated message into a channel spends attention, and a channel that pings all day gets muted — after which it doesn’t matter what you post in it.