Beyond Chitchat: Taking Advantage of Slack as a Productivity Platform
I recently read a post on LinkedIn that discussed the use of Slack within the person’s organization. The gist was about how Slack builds camaraderie across distributed and remote teams in ways that are typically only associated with office-based cultures.
However, when I initially read the post, I was confused because it also referred to fostering team collaboration even though the examples of how Slack was being used included things like “notes of encouragement” between team members. The author shares that they were off Slack for several days and — instead of returning to a channel full of issues or questions — found around 300 exchanges between team members sharing sentiments like “Happy taco Tuesday!” and “Good morning fabulous ladies.”
Now, I have nothing against people using Slack to wish each other well or cheer each other up. But if that’s all it’s being used for, there is a major missed opportunity. Slack was designed to help organizations share knowledge and improve work streams through more transparent communication and collaboration. Using Slack to hype each other up and lift the mood is a great added benefit, but that shouldn’t be its primary purpose.
Slack: The productivity platform
Recently, Slack unveiled new positioning that replaces their “digital HQ” concept with the more impact-focused “productivity platform.” I applaud this focus on productivity because it really gets to the point of why Slack was created and the value it offers.
Work productivity is realized through three functional pillars: work automation, organizational knowledge sharing, and fostering engagement between people. Too many teams only think about Slack in terms of that third pillar — as a sort of digital water cooler for light, non-work-related conversations.
I have seen firsthand the power of Slack as a productivity platform. The best way to help people understand what this means is to provide actual examples. Here I walk you through the ways our group leverages Slack to achieve the original objective for bringing it to market and which has guided its evolution over the past 10 years: making work life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.
Pillar 1: Accelerate work with automation
Of all the possible capabilities of the Slack platform, automation is the one that has the most potential and least usage. Here’s how to take advantage of automation in Slack.
Sales opportunity alerts
There are many different consulting teams in Slalom spanning different geographies, industries, and technologies. The Slack Practice team at Slalom is tasked with providing expertise and consulting resources globally when there is a client need for Slack services. However, it’s not always easy to know which local teams are selling Slack services. Our team uses the integration tool Troops (acquired by Salesforce in 2022) to identify and get notifications of sales opportunities that are associated with Slack services, either in comments or product tag fields in Sales Cloud opportunity records. These notifications are posted into a dedicated Slack channel when they are initially created or if there is a status change associated with the record.
As you can see, these alerts also allow us to go directly to the opportunity record in Salesforce or to update the record from within Slack. But most importantly, it allows our team to have visibility about what is happening across the company and to engage with the appropriate Slalomers involved in selling Slack-related services to a client — when a notification is posted, we create a discussion thread on the post to quickly assign responsibilities within our team for following up with the opportunity owner. Additional information that is gathered from the opportunity owner is then added to the thread, bringing context and a deeper understanding of what is being sold.
Status update reminders
Let’s face it, it’s hard to remember to keep different systems updated. Slack makes it easy to send automated reminders to keep people on top of important tasks, enabled through its no-code Workflow Builder tool.
Our team tracks how individual work streams align to group objectives using Jira, so we created a workflow reminder that is sent into our Slack team channel several hours ahead of our weekly team stand-up call, providing everyone time to update their Jira stories and tasks.
The current capabilities of Workflow Builder are limited (posting messages and providing users with forms that can be submitted into a Slack channel), but Slack is releasing a new version of it this summer that will add a lot more automation functionality and customization extensibility .
Pillar 2: Share and search knowledge
Knowledge channels
Channels are Slack’s secret sauce, keeping conversations focused to topics that people can subscribe to and participate in by joining the channel. But even if you aren’t joined to a channel, you can still find information in it through Slack search as long it is a public channel.
Our team runs a twice-monthly Office Hours session for Slalom employees on all things related to Slack. We have created a channel to post session topics and follow up with content resources. This channel not only allows us to promote what we will cover for each Office Hours session but also to provide a searchable archive that allows people to find information we have shared over time.
Communication channels
Slack makes it easy to disseminate information across large groups. Every workspace includes a default channel that can be used for org-wide communications, but additional channels can be created for communicating with specific groups, large and small. Slalom has a significant number of Salesforce product specialists distributed across the local markets we serve, and there are quarterly all-hands calls that allow us all to hear from our leadership about business objectives and strategy. We use a Slack channel to augment what is being discussed on the call, allowing for follow-up questions, individual perspectives, and additional detailed information to be shared in real time.
Slack Canvas
This is a new Slack capability that we are just getting started with, but which has massive potential for sharing and searching knowledge! Slack Canvas provides the ability to have documents that are natively created and managed in Slack. These documents can include richly formatted text and graphical content, embedded multimedia assets, and information cards that link to assets within or outside Slack. Canvas documents can be associated to a channel (viewed as an additional sidebar element), or they can be inserted into a message (viewed in a channel or DM feed). The ability to have documents living inside Slack will provide countless new ways for information to be shared and productivity to be increased. Some examples include:
- Enablement training paths to accelerate employee onboarding
- FAQ content to cut down on redundant questions and unnecessary requests for assistance
- External information pointers to reduce time spent trying to find key resources in different systems of record
Pillar 3: Connect and engage everyone
Video collaboration
You probably think of Slack as a chat-based technology, but did you know it also has video features? There are two different video capabilities in Slack. The first is using Huddles for real-time meetings. While Huddles don’t have all the bells and whistles of tools that were primarily designed for meetings, they do have a couple of great capabilities. For one thing, Huddles offer the ability to have impromptu real-time meetings without having to go into another tool — either in a direct message or a channel, you just toggle the Huddle switch to turn it on (check out this blog post for guidance on when a Huddle is a good fit for a video meeting).
Our team uses Huddles for 1:1 check-in meetings and for our weekly team stand-up. In both cases, we use channel-based Huddles, which brings me to the other great feature they offer — a persistent chat thread that you can refer to as an information archive. These scenarios for using Huddles are in private channels, so only the invited members in those channels can find and search the information. But for our team it’s extremely useful to have access in Slack to the comments and notes that were added during the Huddles, especially since these are usually related to work streams and objectives. And yes, there are also fun/social items in these chat threads … we aren’t just work-work-work all the time.
Slack’s other video capability is video recordings, known as Clips. Sometimes, our team will do the weekly stand-up via asynchronous updates instead of a live meeting, and when this happens, we each use Slack Clips to post an update in a message thread — each recording can be up to five minutes, which keeps each person focused on highlighting the most important items to share, and each Clip is automatically transcribed with the transcription attached to the video when it is posted. As you can see here, team members can then comment and exchange additional information.
External collaboration
In addition to being able to move work forward within an organization, Slack also provides the ability to collaborate with external stakeholders (customers, partners, vendors, etc.) using Slack Connect, shared channels that span multiple Slack workspace environments. We use these to collaborate with clients during projects and to communicate with our technology partners. Slack Connect channels work just like internal Slack channels, but they are available in each organization’s own Slack environment, with the ability to share the channel across multiple (up to 250) Slack workspaces.
At Slalom we rely on Slack Connect to keep closely aligned with our clients and partners, and they are much more efficient as a communication mechanism compared to email. In addition, you can have Huddle meetings using Slack Connect too! I just finished a project with a client where we had check-in meetings twice each week using a Huddle in our Slack Connect project channel.
Make Slack your productivity platform
If you currently use Slack, you should be asking if you are taking advantage of what it offers to drive productivity — for you, your team, and your organization. If it’s primarily being used to pass innocuous affirmations and humorous asides, you could make the case that Slack is helping reinforce a sense of community and culture. But without a more tangible value proposition, you will see those side benefits diminish over time as individuals lose interest and new employees ignore it.
Slack has continuously raised the bar on how it assists organizations to increase productivity, but productivity has been its core purpose since it was originally launched. Stewart Butterfield, the co-founder and CEO during Slack’s initial nine-plus years, wrote this in a memo to Slack’s employees just ahead of its initial Preview Release in 2013:
[Slack] is not as eye-catching as self-driving cars or implantable chips … But, for organizations that adopt it, there will be a dramatic shift in how time is spent, how communication happens, and how the team’s archives are utilized. There will be changes in how team members relate to one another and, hopefully, significant changes in productivity.
If you see the potential to do more with Slack in your organization, Slalom can help you discover what is possible. Send a request to Slalom’s Slack practice team for a follow-up conversation about how Slack can become your productivity platform.
Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more and reach out today.
