Reducing the work of work
Five ways to automate your everyday tasks in Slack
At Slack, our focus is to make work simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. And a key way we’re bringing that vision to life is with Workflow Builder. In simple terms, Workflow Builder helps teams automate routine, manual tasks, freeing them to work on high-impact projects.
Thanks to Workflow Builder, you don’t have to code to automate work. The only real constraints on what you can create is your own creativity — and we’ve seen so much creativity! Since the launch of Workflow Builder, more than 1M workflows have been created and used over 120M times. See the most popular workflows by visiting our template library, or dive right into building your own, unique automations.
With that in mind, I wanted to share some really innovative ways we’ve seen teams using Workflow Builder to achieve new levels of productivity. Hopefully, you’ll take these ideas and apply them to your own Slack team, or even better, they’ll act as inspiration for you to create a unique new workflow for your team. Let’s dive in!
Onboarding new-hires
Everyone knows how important it is to effectively onboarding new-hires. It can be overwhelming, with a whirlwind of documentation, countless people to meet, and a huge amount of information to process. We hear from many Slack customers that Workflow Builder helps HR, Recruitment, and Onboarding teams streamline that process and make it better for everyone.
I joined Slack last July, and onboarded fully remotely, so I feel like I’m a good judge. Whenever I joined a new Slack channel, I’d automatically receive a welcome message with a packet of information relevant to the channel. Much of the new-hire documentation was automated. Automating the manual processes of starting a new role made a massive difference to the experience, and let me focus on building relationships with new colleagues.
Slack isn’t alone in using Workflow Builder to create better onboarding experiences. Learn how DocuSign and Noom are automating onboarding workflows in Slack.
Hosting team meetings
Regular team meetings are important, but they can often be disruptive. We use workflows to run our all-hands meetings. My fellow VP, Steve Wood, and I record our all-hands and share the video with our team. Everyone then submits their questions via a shortcut-triggered workflow, and we’ll answer them.
We use workflows in place of stand-ups, too. Instead of each person sharing what they’re working on during a video call, everyone completes a quick form, which saves an incredible amount of time.
It’s hard to gather the entire team at once, especially now that everyone is remote. Aside from timing, there’s the opportunity cost of 15 of your top engineers taking an hour out of their day to meet. That adds up — over time it’s costing you tens of thousands of dollars. Even setting that aside, the information shared in a stand-up can just as easily be shared using Slack. And responding via a workflow encourages higher-quality, more thoughtful responses.
McAfee, a technology security company and Slack customer who transitioned their entire organization to work from home due to the pandemic, is a great example of how Workflow Builder helps newly distributed teams. They needed a way to keep open lines of communication between employees and leadership and in turn created a simple workflow to conduct AMAs (Ask Me Anything) Q&A sessions. These sessions were successful in connecting McAfee employees and created an easy, automated solution.
Facilitating feedback
I have to give credit for this to Dave Stevens, an Engineering Manager on my team. Every Friday, he uses a workflow to send his Friday Fives — a list of five things each of his direct reports should be proud of in the last week, and one thing he’d like them to work on.
Getting positive feedback every single week is a huge morale booster and a great conversation starter. Team members feel appreciated and a bigger part of the team culture. For Dave’s part, the workflow he built makes sharing feedback easy — every Friday he’s prompted to complete a form in Slack, and the feedback is instantly shared with the individual.
We’ve seen Slack customers have success doing this too, like Snowflake, the cloud data platform company. Snowflake’s IT team programmed a workflow that prompts employees to react to a message at the end of their IT support session. By responding with the Surfer emoji, Snowflake employees are DM-ed an experience survey (lovingly called a “Surf-vey”) where they can offer feedback and share their experience at their convenience without ever having to leave the Slack platform.
Scheduling logistics
As an engineering leader, demo days are one of my favorite parts of the job, but getting them set-up used to be a pretty time-consuming, manual process.
So, we created a workflow. Now, our engineers are invited a few days in advance, and if they want to present, all engineers have to do is raise an emoji hand in Slack. Everyone who signs up is automatically slotted into a schedule, and the workflow shares reminders and information for the video call. It might sound simple, but it increased participation in our internal demo days by over 200%.
There are all kinds of workflows engineers can build, but if you need some inspiration, here are 6 templates to get you started.
Automating the escalation process
Every week, our Platform Technical Architecture team receives a lot of escalation requests. Besides the quantity, the lack of detail in many requests made it challenging to take appropriate action and to effectively assign the request.
To address this, the team created a workflow for escalation requests. This reduces unnecessary escalations, and improves on the level of detail shared, making it easier to take appropriate action. The introduction of this workflow was a huge win for the team — they boosted productivity and morale, saved engineering hours, and were able to offer better service.
But Slack isn’t alone in using Workflow Builder to streamline business operations — our customers are making use of the technology too.
At a major telco, an operations team responsible for the maintenance and installation of information systems leveraged Workflow Builder to improve the way they handled service requests. Previously, they had relied on email, with each service request generating as many as 10 emails, creating friction and slow response times.
The team created a new system, which integrates Slack channels, Workflows, and Google Sheets to track requests. Before the Slack-centric system, the average time to resolve requests was 20 minutes, but with workflows in place, the average time is 12.51 minutes, a 37% improvement. Adoption is so strong that the team increased its estimated annual cost savings by $16M.
Getting started
Workflow Builder is a great way for your team to get ahead of the curve on no code automation and unlock higher productivity levels. The winning organizations of tomorrow will create automated processes to take care of routine tasks, enable asynchronous communication, and find ways to focus their people on high quality human tasks.
If you’re on a paid Slack plan, you can get started with Workflow Builder today.
Questions? For quick support, you can always email feedback@slack.com.
