Create a streamlined onboarding with the new Slack Canvas
Use the new Slack Canvas to curate, organise and share resources. Customise your canvas with the Workflow Builder Open Beta and create time-saving automation and routine workflows. Slack is helping us do more with less in 2023.
As more companies tackle the challenges of silos and remote collaboration post-pandemic, they each strive to create a one-way single source of truth for their documentation. The reality is, that the static documentation they’re aiming for is failing them. You cannot define a process on paper and then cast it to the depths of a drive. According to Reworked, On average, employees are spending 4.5 hours per week looking for information, and 45% of them say they have too many disconnected systems to search.
It is common for departments and teams in large organisations to find and access the same tools. Having to hunt for quick status updates creates bottlenecks and frustration for teammates.
Slack Canvas is a new surface in your Digital HQ; an ‘evergreen’ web board available for every channel created in Slack, enabling fairer asynchronous collaboration, enhancing collaborative equity and minimising context switching. Canvases in Slack supplement real-time collaboration in channels with a permanent place to keep your most essential resources and information. By having a canvas that makes automation more discoverable and useful, employees will spend less time chasing down information and more time doing thoughtful and innovative work. Slack is bringing people, applications and automation together.
Users need simple access to information. Asynchronous communication allows your team to view what they need to know, when they need to know it, regardless of whether the content was produced yesterday or a year ago.
With Canvas, it’s easy to organise and share information in Slack — at the source of where active activity happens.
What is Slack Canvas?
Canvas will help teams maximise efficiencies. Dedicated Canvases can be created for each account channel with essential information that can be updated by all team members.
Share files, messages, media and team contacts in templates that you can modify as you need, as well as list relevant channels and implement shareable common workflows on each Canvas, without losing context. Additionally, Canvas offers the same features as channels, including rich previews of Clips and profiles of teammates (Slack Atlas). Enhanced Slack Huddles power spontaneous discussions and live co-working/conferencing, and Clips can add human emotion to notes, leaving less room for miscommunication.
Slack Canvas makes it easy to create a snapshot of all the data that teammates need, code-free.
Use Slack Canvas for a streamlined onboarding experience.
It’s easy to imagine the possibilities that Slack Canvas creates. However, for practitioners, it’s helpful to know the best use cases for Canvas; especially in comparison to other established Service Management software or Collaboration Wikis.
Canvas offers the opportunity to jump-start productivity; getting new teammates up to speed by sharing resources that they need in one place. We have been looking into this at Absurd, utilising Figma and Confluence to design a visual onboarding pack that everyone can contribute to. In Canvas, we can now include a checklist of onboarding activities, recommended channels to join along with necessary files to review and read. Slack also allows us to embed workflows to complete tasks such as downloading our software stack, without leaving the app, at the touch of a button.
Using Canvas as a dashboard for our clients helps our new starters review the case history. To get to know our clients, we can introduce them through Slack Connect, and even use this in place of the weekly syncs to get approvals and feedback.
But the biggest win for Slack Canvas, is the removal of friction from an organisation, especially when teams work remotely and across different verticals. As a common workspace, Canvas breaks down silos and ensures that all employees feel connected to the company and have a sense of belonging, no matter where they are/work from. By allowing them to contribute asynchronously and across time zones, we break down the barriers that stop us from getting to know each other.
Other employees will help solve the problem.
Slack ensures you have the same commitments from your company and each other, whether you are in the office or at home. This is not the return to old ways of working, but the new ways post-pandemic.
New collaboration tools and collaborative equity offer a new level of engagement that wasn’t possible through email. You can’t know what happens to an email after you send it. You can only bring people into a conversation halfway down the chain. Communicating through Slack allows us to align, action and improve accountability in conversations. A channel system tree supports minimal gaps in our network and streamlines communications, which helps people know where to go to reference information and documentation in onboarding, better than email ever could.
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We’re deep diving into establishing ways of working and processes that work for large organisations and their employees. Slack Canvas is a new part of an existing software stack for 2023 that aims to improve the quality, pace and culture of work by continually empowering employees. We’re saving time with Slack to focus on what really matters, and looking forward to Canvas seamlessly integrating with our project plans.
Let’s make something great together
Ready to start your next project? We’re available to talk through your needs and how we can help.
