How do you know that someone on slack is not busy ATM and is available to chat? How do you deal with pings from slack discussion in some channel when you can’t chat and have to focus on a meeting?
It can take a while to get people trained and into the habit of communicating with tools like Slack, and to develop a style that works for your office.
At a previous company we were 100% remote since about 2013. We had meetings to develop a set of practices around how to use remote tools to figure out what worked best for us. We encouraged people to use their status indicators to show when they were open for chats, set DND if they wanted quite time, maintain core hours (we were distributed world-wide, so core hours were zoned), encouraged people to use named channels rather than ad-hoc groups or DMs whenever possible, and always when discussing anything work related (absolutely no private chats about work projects, everything work-related went in a project channel).
We also were careful to adopt an ‘if anyone is remote, everyone is remote’ attitude. This means that if any team member is remote, then all team activities are conducted with remote access. For example, if the remote tools for a meeting are not working, then the meeting is rescheduled rather than being conducted without the remote people.
At my current job most of us are flex, sometimes in the office, sometimes not, and they’ve only supported WFH at all since covid lockdowns started. Previously they were 100% in-office. As a result their remote work habits are relatively primitive, with lots of ad-hoc group chats, private messages, and occasional meetings that don’t include the whole team (it doesn’t help that they use Teams, which is relatively shitty compared to Slack). I’ve pushed for a better remote-work culture, but it’s an uphill battle.
If you are running into communications issues with remote work it might be worth initiating a discussion about how you, as a collective, use the tools. Getting everybody on-board with a common set of practices that mostly works for everyone is important, especially if you have a lot of people who haven’t already spent a great deal of time using remote communication tools (a lot of us IT folks have spent a great deal of our lives using these tools and can overlook the unfamiliarity some others have with them and the usage habits that make them effective).