How I made sure our company didn’t drown in useless slack channels

Hi. My name is Alexandra and I’ll tell you how we built our communication world 💜

I joined the company when we had about 60 people, 1 small office, one country, and two channels of communication in Slack: “everyone” for official news and “random” for some informal stuff. We only knew one thing about our internal communications: no emails. Instead, everything would happen on Slack. And step by step we set up some company events. Now we are 350+ people, 30+ nationalities, offices in 3 countries, and a lot of channels, content, and events.

None of this happened overnight, of course, but through trial and error, I realized that thinking more product-centric could help here. Communication is a product, the target audience is our employees, which means we have to determine who they are, what they need, what needs we have to solve. And of course, consistency and structure are critical, to avoid Slack turning into a pile of useless junk.

The first step is to determine what criteria we will use to evaluate our employees — In our case, the important criteria are location, language, interests, common issues.

What types of channels do we need based on these criteria?

1. Official general channels: relevant stuff for all. Mandatory read once a day. Channels with important company news, with information about what’s going on in other teams, and to maintain important elements of the corporate culture

• official news
• team digests, where teach manager summarises their team’s work for the whole company to see

1. Official non-general channels: relevant to all, in a “nice to have” format but not a mandatory read on a regular basis

• random stuff
• our app suggestions
• awards and appreciation

1. Official location channels: Relevant for each location separately, mandatory to read once a day. Local news and so on
2. Unofficial fun channels

• gamers
• food
• music

1. Knowledge sharing channels

• community channels (product, design, and so on)
• investment club
• mental health

Official — are mostly run by members of the Talent Management team

Unofficial — can be run by any employee of the company. Launched and “invisibly” supported by the Talent Management team

Does it look like a set of channels? It’s more than that — each channel is its own project and its own little world, with its own leaders, mood, company of people, and all these are important elements of social and information connections in a company. Through them, people learn information, share knowledge and news, find friends among colleagues, and so on. That’s why it’s so important to intelligently develop and maintain this ecosystem.

For the launch of each channel, we created PR campaigns and content plans for 1–2 months. We also have a communications calendar where all team members schedule communications into different channels so that there aren’t too many messages on the same day, for example.

In this way, each employee has their own list of mandatory and non-mandatory channels. For example: official news, team digests, official location channel, random stuff, community channel, gamers.

We also have various interesting events, communities, but we’ll talk about that next time 🚀