If you want your Slack to take off, you first need to introduce clear guidelines. Give staff a clear, one page document of what is out of bounds, but also make it clear what you want to see discussed. Perhaps an “everything but religion and politics” rule. Something, anything. And then encourage the chattiest people in your teams to use the software, and dont micro-manage their conversations.

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If you rely on individual managers to govern the conversation, the chat will be as stifled as your most uptight manager. Instead, call for a team of moderators from your staff. In a previous life I ran a forum with 45,000 active users and just 12 moderators. With clear, enforced guidelines, you can have a stupidly active community with very little moderation needed.

Next, give staff a reason to be there. Start with the fun stuff, even if it’s just forced fun stuff. Move your footy tips to Teams, your weekly newsletter, your plans for the Christmas party. Anything that doesn’t need to be an email.

Most importantly, give your staff the freedom to chat about non-work related topics. Because they’re doing it anyway in iMessage, Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp threads and, in amongst their lunch plans and dank memes, so much valuable information is being locked up in these walled gardens.

While this sounds like a lot of work, it’s worth it; because the value of a one-to-many chat platform is incredible. Done right, a collaborative chat platform can become a living, breathing wiki; always up to date, and searchable.