The context
Without a written norm, response speed becomes a status game. Everything arrives by direct message, and urgent and non-urgent look identical. Decisions get made in chat threads nobody can find three weeks later.
New colleagues guess which channel to use, usually by copying whoever they sat next to first. The fix is one page, and it takes an hour to write.
The pattern
For every channel you use, write down two things: what it is for, and how fast a reply can be expected. Cap internal replies at three business days and external replies at seven days (or an acknowledgement).
A workable default set:
| Channel | What it is for | Response time |
|---|---|---|
| Task tracker (Asana, Linear) | Anything that needs tracking, an owner or a due date | 3 business days |
| Chat (Slack, Teams) | Quick clarifications, check-ins and social | Same day for direct messages and mentions. No expectation on channel messages |
| Task tracker + chat | Something urgent: you need it within three days | Create the task, then link it in a chat message so it gets seen today |
| Wiki (Slite, Notion) | Documentation and decisions that outlive the week. Comment for questions | 3 business days |
| External email | Anyone outside the organization | 7 days, or an acknowledgement within 7 days if the answer takes longer |
| A call or a walk | Disagreement, feedback, anything with emotional weight | Not a last resort. More often the right first choice than teams think |
The task tracker + chat combination is the one most teams miss. It keeps urgent work tracked, with an owner and a due date, while the chat ping makes sure it doesn't wait three days to be noticed.
Five rules that make it work
A norms page only works when people know how to use the channels, not just which ones exist.
- If your chat message runs longer than three sentences, make it a task. Long chat messages are tasks in disguise, and they vanish.
- Over-ask rather than under-ask. Don't decide on someone else's behalf that they're too busy to be asked.
- Say when you need it. Say honestly when you can do it. A stated date beats an implied urgency.
- Record decisions where the work lives. Not in the thread where they happened.
- Put expectations in role accountabilities. Not in chat history. If it only exists in a thread, nobody is accountable for it.
Decision test: a colleague in their first week should be able to pick the right channel and know when to expect an answer, without asking anyone.
How the School for Moral Ambition does it
The School for Moral Ambition works async by default. Nobody has to prove they're available, and everyone is encouraged to turn notifications off and check their inboxes when they choose. Their norms were adopted through a governance proposal, so anyone can change them with a new one.
Internal: max. 3 business days. External: max. 7 days (or an acknowledgement).
| Channel | When to use it | Response time |
|---|---|---|
| Asana | Tasks, projects, anything that needs tracking | 3 business days |
| Slack | Quick clarifications, urgent matters, check-ins | A few hours for direct messages and mentions |
| Asana + Slack | When you need something done very urgently | When it's needed within 3 days or less |
| External email | Contacts, partners, applicants, general inquiries | 7 days, or send an acknowledgement |
| Slite | Documentation. Comment for clarifications | 3 business days |
| Face to face | Immediate needs. This is an escalation | Immediately (knock on the table if someone has headphones on) |
Their acknowledgement for external email when there's no time for a full answer: "Thanks for reaching out. We receive many messages and can't respond to all, but we appreciate your input."
What to do
- List your channels, including the ones you wish people didn't use.
- Write one purpose and one response time per channel. Promise what you can actually keep: a norm nobody meets is worse than none.
- Name the escalation route for genuinely urgent things, and define urgent. If everything qualifies, nothing does.
- Publish it on the wiki, link it from onboarding, and mention it once in each channel.
- Review after a month. Where reality and the page disagree, change the page.
What's mandatory regardless
Personal data about staff, beneficiaries or donors doesn't belong in chat. Keep it in systems with access control and a retention policy.
Chat history is searchable by everyone in the workspace, indefinitely. Under the GDPR you need to be able to find and delete personal data on request, and that is hard to do across a decade of threads.
Your variation
Record your organization's choices:
- Your channel list, with a purpose and response time each
- What counts as urgent, and the escalation route
- Whether there is any out-of-hours expectation, and for whom
- Where decisions are recorded
- Whether the norms are advice or a policy that changes only by proposal