The 7 slack channels that will bring your remote team closer together
How to feel closer to your team when you all work on opposite sides of the world? Sometimes having a few chat channels dedicated to non-work related topics helps…
Working in a remote team allows you more freedom and flexibility, makes the work/life balance easier and enables you to work from wherever in the world you want. One of the few downsides is not being able to hang out with and get to know your team as well on a human level.
We have a few tips for creative Slack channels that help us feel more connected to the amazing people in our team and open up the communication channels beyond work.
1. Presence
If you have flexible hours sometimes just a quick note if you’ll be late to start or away from your keyboard can help your team a lot. Examples:
- “AFK for an hour to walk the dog”
- “OOO for late lunch”
- “Going for a quick run!”
2. Praise
Compliments, praise & gratitude — these are all IMPORTANT to help keep up team morale and happiness. Anyone on the team can offer praise or receive praise and it’s a great way to practice gratitude in your work life, motivate your team members and feel valued for what you do. Examples:
- “Praise to Megan for her kick-ass press release launched this week”
- “Kent went running 4 times this week — nice! keep it up!”
- “Michal is REALLY picking up her UX/UI game this month — really impressed”
- “Congrats to Wayne on his Scrum Master certification!”
3. Health
This may seem like more of an odd one, but this channel has helped to keep me inspired to at least TRY and stay healthy. Some members on our team are super passionate about their health and fitness and it’s motivating to post great tips for staying healthy, proposing exercising regimes, organizing hikes or motivating one another to stay fit. Examples:
- “@here Keen to do the platteklip hike on Saturday morning, anyone keen to join the hike?”
- “Just discovered fightmaster yoga — great yoga video workouts for home”
- “This is where I did meditation today (meditation with Sam Harris’s “Waking Up” app)”
4. Memes
I should probably not have to explain the purpose of this one to you. Our team is meme powered. There’s nothing like receiving your Monday motivation in memes.
5. Music
Get to know your team through the music they listen to. Share your favorite tunes with the team and find out who has the same taste in music as you. This is also a great way to discover new tracks and throw something different into your day to day work chat!
6. Internetbeans
Magical internet beans. Whatever cool articles, content, pictures, websites that you happen to stumble across on the world wide web that you find interesting, funny or weird — share that shit.
7. Journals
In our team, each team member that wants to, can create a journal channel for themselves — i.e #journal_devon and post their own mini-blogs about what's on their mind, interesting thoughts, what's going on in their life — work or personal related that they want to share. This is not a mandatory channel and you can join & leave the channels of whoever you feel like — but it is a great way to share with your team and to get to know each other a bit better.
Bonus: Our fave Integrations
8. Giphy!
Any Slack message can get a bit more interesting when you express it as a gif.
9. Calendar (Google calendar integration)
Keep the team up to date with what’s happening company-wide. This includes events, conferences, team member birthdays and leave dates. It really helps to get everyone on the same page and create clarity. At the moment I have our Slack hooked up to our General team calendar with a weekly summary notification going out every Monday morning at 9am.
Bonus Bonus: Added tips
10. Use emoticons to react to when people post ANYTHING. It shows acknowledgment that you have read it. :super_taco: :heart_eyes:
11. We use numbers and letter as a prefix method of labeling our slack channels to make them appear in order of importance/relevance. i.e. most important channels are labeled with a 1, “1lead”, “1generalcore” and least relevant with a z, i.e. “zjournal”.
Thanks for reading! Do you have any other Slack channels that your team makes use of and can recommend? Leave us your thoughts in the comments section below.
