Your Slack Team is Sacred

Slack’s highest level grouping is the Team. Everything in Slack, whether it’s a user, channel, direct message or even an integration is namespaced to a team. Every team a user is a part of requires a different user name and password and functions as a closed ecosystem.

Effective Slack teams are almost always scoped to a company. This way, it’s easy for anyone on staff to contact any of their coworkers. In a single team Slack setup, when someone on the sales team wants to contact HR, they’re only a click away.

Slack’s applications, especially on mobile phones, are designed to encourage this. In the mobile apps, switching between teams isn’t easy. In the desktop application, adding too many teams can slow down a computer.

In most cases, Employees are on one Slack team and never have to think about switching. However, in some organizations, unifying conversations into one team can take work.

While a one team Slack install is optimal, it’s not always the starting point. Slack often spreads from the bottom up. As it spreads organically, multiple teams show up inside a company. Eventually, it becomes necessary to merge the disparate teams.

How to merge Slack teams

It’s crucial to lay out a plan before merging teams. Start with an overview of all the teams in your organization and their size. Use this to decide which team to use as the receiving repository. Next, make a list of everyone in the teams you’ll be merging.

Then, communicate what you’ll be doing and the implications. Make it clear that all direct messages and private channels will go away. Additionally, after a migration, employees will have to sign into Slack at a new domain. Then, after giving appropriate warning, pull the trigger and merge your teams.

A merger isn’t always the best strategy. A one team Slack instance can become overwhelming when a company hits the 1000–2000 person mark. In this case, it usually makes sense to start breaking Slack into distinct teams for each business unit.

Slack’s enterprise offering is designed for organizations operating with multiple teams and makes managing users and settings across multiple teams much easier. If your team is operating at enterprise scale, it makes sense to get in touch with a Slack account manager and work with them to deploy Slack Enterprise.