Slack is your remote team's social media. Treat it like it.

I’ve worked remotely for years. Nine of them, full time - four and a half at Deepgram. No office, no watercooler, no accidentally bumping into someone in the kitchen and finding out they’re also obsessed with the same obscure thing you are (ICQ, Warcraft, Cats!). The texture of work relationships, the part that makes you actually like the people you work with, doesn’t happen in Asana tasks or Google Meet. It happens in the margins.

For remote workers, those margins live in Slack.

Not the #announcements channel. Not the project channels where everything is professional and on-record and vaguely performative. I mean the channels where someone posts a meme about the thing that broke on Friday, and six people pile on, and suddenly you understand each other a little better than you did before. That’s not noise. That’s culture forming in real time.

I’ll be upfront: some of my American colleagues think I’m unprofessional. I’m British, I swear a bit, I post memes, I have a sense of humour that doesn’t always survive the Atlantic crossing intact. Fine. I’m also regularly working 14 to 16 hour days to make sure things ship, and my output speaks for itself. I’m not saying this to be a dick about it. I’m saying it because “unprofessional” is often a proxy for “unfamiliar,” and those are not the same thing. Having fun is not the opposite of working hard. For a lot of us, it’s what makes working hard sustainable.

I’ve watched companies get this wrong, and the pattern is always the same. Someone in a position of authority decides that Slack is getting out of hand. Too many memes. Too much off-topic chat. It’s distracting. It’s unprofessional. A message goes out, very serious, very measured, and the implicit message lands hard: this is a place of work, not play. Fun has been audited and found wanting.

And then the channels go quiet. Not the work channels. Those stay loud and miserable. The other ones, the ones where people were actually being human with each other, those dry up fast. Tumbleweeds. The occasional “does anyone know how to…” and nothing else.

What people don’t seem to understand is that remote workers have nowhere else to go. An office worker who gets told to keep Teams professional still has the walk to the car park, the coffee run, the lunch where someone does a bit that doesn’t land and everyone laughs anyway because you’re all physically in the same room and that counts for something. Remote workers don’t have that. Slack is that space. When you police it like a ticketing system, you’ve eliminated the last place people had to actually be a person.

Nine years of this teaches you things. Good cultures and bad ones. The difference isn’t professionalism. The “professional” teams I’ve been on have often been the most miserable, the most siloed, the most likely to have someone quietly job hunting while nodding along in standup. The good cultures had something else: a sense of humour. Not forced fun, not a designated channel for GIFs that nobody uses, actual, organic, often deeply stupid shared humour that made you feel like you were in it together.

I work at Deepgram. We’ve always been irreverent. Lean teams, real economic pressure, the kind of circumstances that would make a lesser culture fold. We didn’t fold. We shipped some of the best voice AI products on the planet, with a skeleton crew, while still finding time to be genuinely funny in Slack. That’s not a coincidence. The irreverence wasn’t a distraction from the work. It was the glue that held the team together while we did the work. You don’t survive hard times with a culture that’s been sanitised into enterprise-shaped politeness. You survive them with people who actually like each other and are willing to go the extra mile because the team feels worth going the extra mile for.

Meme culture in Slack gets dismissed as trivial. It isn’t. Shared humour is how humans signal alignment. When someone posts a reaction image that perfectly captures the feeling of a bad deploy at 4pm on a Friday and the whole team loses it in the thread, that’s a team. That’s a shared experience that didn’t require a facilitator, a Miro board, or a trust fall. It happened organically, it cost nothing, and it made everyone feel slightly less alone in their individual home offices, probably still in yesterday’s hoodie, definitely not on camera.

The irony is that the crackdowns usually happen in the name of culture. High performance. Professionalism. Focus. As if culture is a thing you can staple to a slide deck and call done. It isn’t. Culture is the accumulation of small moments where people feel like they belong somewhere. You can’t mandate belonging into existence. You can only create the conditions for it, or if you’re not careful, quietly kill it while congratulating yourself for maintaining standards.

I’ve seen what it looks like when the fun gets managed out. People get transactional as hell. Do the work, close the laptop, don’t hang around. Why would they? There’s nothing to hang around for. The informal social layer that made Slack feel like a place, a weird, chaotic, occasionally deeply stupid place, sure, but a place, evaporates. What’s left is a faster email client with more emoji reactions on things that don’t deserve them.

If you’re managing remote teams and you’re worried about Slack being too chaotic, I’d genuinely ask you to sit with that for a minute. Is the chaos actually causing harm? Or does it just make you uncomfortable because you’re used to environments where that energy had somewhere else to go? Because your remote workers don’t have somewhere else. This is it. The meme channel isn’t a distraction from their work life. It is their work life, the bit that makes the rest of it bearable at hour thirteen with two PRs still open.

And if you’ve got a culture that’s naturally irreverent, that developed organically, that people actually love, please for the love of god don’t try to “fix” it. Don’t sand the edges off something real because it doesn’t look like what you imagined a serious company should look like. Serious companies with joyless Slack workspaces are everywhere. Great ones with cultures worth protecting are not.

The memes aren’t the problem. The isolation is.

And if your gut reaction to this is that I’m wrong, that professionalism matters, that there’s a time and a place, just know that your remote team almost certainly has a group chat somewhere that you’re not in, where they’re saying exactly what they actually think.

Probably with memes.

FAQ

Why is informal chat important in remote teams?

For remote workers, tools like Slack are the equivalent of the office watercooler, the coffee run, and the walk to the car park. Informal chat, memes, and off-topic conversations are how culture forms and how colleagues build trust and psychological safety. When you police these spaces too heavily, you eliminate the only place remote workers have to be human with each other.

Does meme culture in Slack hurt productivity?

No. In fact, it often sustains it. Shared humor and irreverence act as social glue, especially during high-pressure periods or long hours. Teams that can laugh together are often the ones that can survive hard times and ship great products without burning out. Professionalism and fun are not mutually exclusive.

How should managers handle “unprofessional” Slack behavior?

Managers should recognize that “unprofessional” is often just a proxy for “unfamiliar” or “different communication style.” Instead of sanitizing communication into enterprise-shaped politeness, leaders should focus on outcomes and output. If the work is getting done and the team is aligned, policing tone or meme usage usually does more harm to morale than good.