Chat channels are queues wearing costumes
The team channel is an unbounded, unowned, unprioritized work queue with no SLA. Treating it like one is the fix.
Every engineering team has a channel where requests arrive: the question from support, the "quick favor" from the adjacent team, the thing that is probably a bug. Nobody calls it a queue, which is how it avoids every discipline queues have earned. No owner, no priority, no limit, no promise about response time, and complete amnesia: yesterday's unanswered request is simply higher in the scrollback, which is to say gone.
The costume matters because it hides real load. The meeting audit finds the scheduled attention spend; the channel is the unscheduled remainder, and for teams that operate anything, it is frequently larger. It also selects its victims badly: the most responsive person becomes the de facto owner, pays the reentry toll all day, and is then puzzled at review time by a quarter with no shipped work.
The fix is to admit it is a queue and give it queue furniture. One rotating triager, so responsiveness is a role, not a personality tax. A form or emoji that converts real requests into tracked items, so they compete with roadmap work visibly instead of by interruption. And a stated response window, which mostly exists so that everything else can wait without guilt.
The tradeoff is friction for askers, who liked the instant service, and some will say so. The number to hold up in that conversation is the one the costume was hiding: how many hours a week the channel actually consumed, and whose.