3 New Ways Slack Can Improve Organizational Alignment
Reflecting on key announcements at Slack Frontiers 2022
Were you able to attend (in person or virtually) the Slack Frontiers ’22 conference? A group of Slalom’s Slack practitioners were in NYC as speakers and panelists at the event. However, it was also a great opportunity for our team to learn about upcoming Slack innovations and product direction. As we reflected afterwards, we were most impressed with three key announcements that validated Slack’s focus on increasing organizational alignment in an increasingly distributed and hybrid workplace:
1. Huddles advancements
2. GovSlack
3. A new Slack platform
So, how are each of these increasing alignment?
Slack Huddles: Real-time collaboration is on
Slack is best known for helping organizations collaborate asynchronously across distributed teams, locations, and time zones. However, the best collaboration often happens when people can share ideas while talking and seeing each other in the moment, which is why organizations that use Slack also typically have a separate video meeting solution.
Slack has been adding new methods for real-time collaboration, with the most notable feature being Slack Huddles. In its initial release, Huddles has just been a good way to have an ad-hoc audio and screen-sharing conversation when sending a message isn’t sufficient (everything from resolving a long, threaded discussion to a casual catch-up conversation after the weekend), but it has lacked capabilities compared to solutions that are built for video conferencing.
During the opening keynote, Anna Niess, senior director of product design at Slack, demonstrated the next version of Huddles in real time with her design team. In addition to adding the ability for full video conferencing, Huddles will also allow multi-screen sharing and user annotations.
The most impactful upgrade, however, is the ability to have a threaded conversation as part of the Huddle: messages, attachments and images can all be included, just as with any threaded message in Slack. And if the Huddle was started within a channel, the entire set of information is saved to that channel as a consolidated artifact that can be retained, searched and easily shared with other members of the organization. This ability to combine Huddles with threaded conversations in a channel makes it a great solution for office hours sessions, team standups, departmental all-hands, or organizational “Ask Me Anything” sessions, all driving increased alignment within Slack.
GovSlack: A great solution for the public sector
During its 10 years of improving organizational collaboration, Slack has primarily been used in the private sector. While Slack can be a fantastic collaboration tool for governmental agencies and departments, the headwinds of compliance certifications and restrictive purchasing approvals have kept it from widespread use. With the launch of its public sector offering, GovSlack, in the summer of 2022, these stringent compliance and security standards will no longer be an issue.
At the conference, several of GovSlack’s pilot customers spoke about how they use Slack and what it can bring in terms of improved alignment and collaboration:
- The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been using GovSlack not only for internal communications and knowledge sharing, but also for working with the private sector and other external entities. Robert Costello from CISA discussed how Slack Connect enhances their “partnership development” mandate, improving collaboration to “enable stakeholders in government and the private sector to make informed risk management decisions and investments.”
- Angelica Phaneuf from the U.S. Army Software Factory shared how GovSlack is empowering a fully distributed team to work together and have a best-in-class software delivery capability that is fully staffed and run by Army soldiers. GovSlack enables this not only through its robust virtual communication and collaboration features, but also through its ability to securely integrate with its other approved applications and services.
The new Slack platform: Not just for developers
While most people think of Slack as a communications solution, it’s actually a powerful platform that can be customized to meet the unique needs of each organization using it. The most visible part of the Slack platform is the Slack App Directory, allowing third-party applications to be distributed and run in Slack, as well as enabling a variety of integrations with other enterprise systems. Custom Slack apps can also be developed and run in Slack, though not every organization has the resources or capacity for building such apps.
Slack took the first step towards giving non-technical users the ability to customize actions and processes in a workspace with Workflow Builder, enabling simple automations through a drag-and-drop tool. Workflow Builder is an extremely useful tool, however, it’s fairly limited in the types of actions it allows — workflow steps are either sending messages or forms.
Another highlight at the conference was seeing how Slack is expanding its platform to cater to non-developers. This is being accomplished in two ways:
1. Adding a new functionality to Workflow Builder through reusable “blocks” that Slack users can access to build powerful automations.
Think of blocks as mini Slack apps available through Workflow Builder — some are provided by Slack, some by third parties (similar to applications on the Slack App Directory), and some by organizations themselves. While there is still coding required to create blocks (in the custom blocks scenario), Slack is making it easier to deploy and share these by allowing them to be hosted on the platform, removing the previous burden of having to both code and manage hosting for an app. Check out this new Slack video on blocks for more details.
2. Providing Salesforce CRM power users the ability to integrate Sales/Service Cloud and Slack using Salesforce Flows.
This capability will enable event-driven actions to be initiated in Salesforce while allowing user interactions to take place in Slack. This functionality was discussed in more detail at the Salesforce Trailblazer DX conference in May. Read more about what’s coming in this detailed blog post.
The takeway from Frontiers’ takeaways
The innovations announced at this year’s event can best be summarized by the tenets for improving alignment that were outlined by Slack’s chief product officer, Tamar Yehoshua:
• Make what’s hard in the office better
• Bring what we love in the office into Slack
• Create things unique to the Digital HQ
All in all, those are improvements we can align with.
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