How Square’s distributed sales team uses Slack to feel like a family.
Square has more than 30 sales support people, spread across three offices. It’s Andrew Berger’s job to make sure that the Sales Development and Onboarding teams operate on all cylinders across time zones.
A big part of that is maintaining a feeling of culture and connectedness between locations. For this herculean task, Berger has a secret weapon in his back pocket, Slack.
Square’s sales team uses Slack for productivity, they have dozens of channels where work gets done. But, they also leverage Slack to build connections between team members.
Andrew shared three tricks his team uses to stay connected:
1. Global routines
Like most Slack teams, Square has organically developed a number of daily and weekly routines. Our favorite happens at 3pm every day.
Every afternoon, the team celebrates “Tea Time.” During tea time, a different person gets to choose a song from Spotify and share it with their coworkers. Yesterday, someone from the St. Louis team shared Shape of You, by Ed Sheeran. Today, someone from San Francisco shared Like a Prayer by Madonna.
Andrew explains that, “It makes the people in New York and St. Louis feel like they’re part of HQ,” because they’re sharing songs and having conversations every day.
Pro tip: use Slack’s /remind feature to schedule reminders for your own tea time or similar routine.
2. Celebrate team wins
Berger explains that, “[they] installed Troops to keep the New York, St. Louis, San Francisco, and soon-to-be global teams, connected and help them feel like they’re part of the organization”
With Troops, Square automatically celebrates the closing of big sales. Every time a big deal closes, the Troops bot posts an alert and a gif to Slack.
Teammates around the country get to feel like they’re a part of a fast moving organization bigger than just their office and sales reps and SDRs get celebrated for the hard work that goes into closing a sale.
Sales teams like Andrew’s have been celebrating wins for ages, often with a big gong. With Slack and Troops, they’re able to create a virtual gong that works across multiple offices.
3. Covert surprises
When a birthday or milestone comes up for a member of the team, Square uses Slack to coordinate surprises. While the team tries to avoid private channels, they make an exception for gifting.
On Andrew’s birthday, his coworkers created a private channel #notandrew to discuss the surprise and decide what to get him. When they settled on gluten free pizza, they settled up on Square Cash and ordered the pies.
Spontaneous gifting happens pretty regularly at Square. Last week, an SDR Manager created a Slack channel to buy a colleague a bottle of her favorite Tequila. The bottle was too expensive for one person to buy alone, but bringing the team together in Slack made the gift attainable and even more special.
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Distributed teams everywhere are discovering that Slack doesn’t just keep them on the same page, it strengthens bonds between coworkers.
It’s no wonder 80% of users report that team culture has improved thanks to Slack.
Slash-hyphen is the consulting firm that helps organizations large and small get the most out of Slack. Our clients range from Fortune 500 firms to small startups.
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