For your work email?

If I had a 50% response rate for emails that clearly need a response, that would severely impact my ability to do my job and would likely result in my manager taking steps to help me improve that.

Oh I don’t even open my work email. That has a 100% ignore rate. If it’s not important enough to Slack or talk to me about it doesn’t exist.

I meant for my real email.

As for my manager taking steps to help me improve that, he’s even worse. Or just has a stronger things-that-are-important filter than I do for Slack. Email is for papertrailing things that were previously agreed upon in person or on slack.

If your work email is not worth reading, you have a communications problem at your company.

The problem is not 'Slack' or 'Email' - it's the wasted communications energy at all these companies.

Most companies have not figured this out, and think that tech will solve if for them. Not so much.

Often the "communications problem" is that people have low reading comprehension, and cannot type.

People miss emails, but it's not anywhere near as common as people missing a slack message...in my experience.

The thing is, Slack isn't really really good at async communication at all. If I @mentioned someone and asked them a question, if they haven't responded to it within an hour or two, the odds of them coming back and answering it are extremely slim. People do miss e-mails, but not to that degree.

I feel like threads + reply tracking could easily solve that. They already have the concept of unread items and threads, they could just add a channel / tab for DM's you haven't explicitly replied to (or acknowledged).

I feel like slack (and competitors) have a lot of room to grow still.

That sounds like you’re misusing chaty channels. This is what DMs are for. I’ve had good success with people coming back even days later to answer questions on DM.

Especially when timezones are involved