How Slack uses Slack to Thrive as a Team | Amazing Teams by Slack | 2016

all right so you all are here for the thriving with your team and slack session so it's nice to see all of you my name is rachel leigh i'm on the accounts team here at slack i've been here for about nine or so months prior to being here I was at box for a few years I am really excited about companies that are building products that transform the way that we work that's really exciting for me the other reason I'm excited for this session in particular is because I personally am just a sucker for productivity tips I love it hacks tips all of it it's my jam so I hope that's why all of you are here as well so before we get started I'd love to just understand a little bit about who we have here in the room how many of you all have been using slack for just under a month raise of hands okay we've got a few folks what about three to six months little few more hands what about nine months and beyond all right we got a lot of hands here so certainly have a mix of folks in the room final question before we jump in how many of you all are admins or owners or primary owners of your team okay it's a majority of folks and I guess it's safe to say the rest of you all our end users I am on our slack team as well so what you can expect today is really just a bunch of tips and tricks to help you get more out of slack so a lot of you may already be experts you may know a lot of this we're going to do a bit of periodic polling and checking to kind of feel the room and see how this is going we would love your feedback on how we can make this better in the future all right so you've been hearing this all throughout the day April shared it and Allie referred to it as well but this is because it's really really important to us at slack it ties in to every single thing that we do and also ties in to our conversation today our mission is to make people's working lives simpler more pleasant and more productive so if we can help you do that as you communicate with your team as you get your job done we really want to make that impact and it also ties into the way that this conversation will continue today the first part of our conversation is about how you can work in suc how you can get more out of slack as you are using it for yourself that's the productivity aspect secondly slack is no fun if you use it by yourself I hope none of you are using slack by yourself that's not going to be very fun and so how you can actually use it with your team and get the most out of it and then thirdly and related to our panel that we just had how you can foster your team culture in slack how you can bring the best aspects of your culture and grow that within slack and how slack can actually help you do that so the first part is working in slack and really will jump in and get your thoughts and feedback hopefully some of these tips and tricks will be new stuff that you didn't actually know coming in here so we've heard a lot about this slack really helps increase the transparency you can see the conversations that are not only happening within your team in your sphere within your organization but you can see that across the entire business and that's really cool but there's a lot of information that's available now at your fingertips so how can you not be distracted how can you really focus on what you care about and what's important to you we have a few tips to help with that the first one is starring conversations every single channel private channel direct message can be start which means that it's pinned to the top left hand corner of your sock interface it's going to stay there and it's really easy to jump back and forth to those conversations you're going to want to star conversations that you participate in literally every day so maybe DMS with your boss DMS with your colleagues your project channels your team channels those are great ones to start right there in the top left the second one is highlight words and this is really really powerful it's a way for you to customize for every single end user you're proactive notifications so what you care about and slack will proactively notify you anytime one of those highlight words are triggered right so this could be your project that you're working on your own name so for me Rachel is one of my highlight words so even if so one forgets to @mention me anytime they say Rachel I'm going to be notified right I mentioned I work with clients all day so anytime one of my customer names are mentioned let's say someone writes in with an urgent customer support ticket even if no one stops to think about hey Rachel will probably want to know about this anytime they mention that client name I'm going to be notified in our Zendesk channel for example some fun use cases for this is people will type it put in the phrase sign up so anytime there's a new sign up for a new perk like a massage or yoga classes you'll be the first to know if anyone says food trucks we're going to go for food trucks you're right there to sign up and head out the door with them how many of you all are already using highlight words show of hands okay hopefully was new for the rest of you before I move on actually one of the best practices that I learned from a customer is they were an evangelist that brought slack into their team and they were responsible for answering the queuing the questions that a lot of the folks on their team had so they actually put slack as one of their highlight words because they realize that whenever someone's mentioning slack it's because they have a question and they're saying hey do you know how to do this in slack or I tried this in sauk and it didn't work and so that highlight word actually triggered their notification they jumped in and we're ready to help next at mention panels this is sits at the top right hand corner of slack and it basically collects all of the action items so any time you were at mention it's going to save that in your at mention panel for you this is the first thing that I check when I've been away from slack maybe I was in a meeting or two meetings and I've been away from slack I haven't checked it probably what I'm going to do right after this is go and check my @mention panel so I can see who asked me to look at something where we view something that's a great place to prioritize when you come back to slack for the first time after being away yep the question was do you also get notification on highlight words that you are not part of the answer is no so you want to be a member of those channels and in just a bit we're going to talk about how you can control be a part of a lot of channels but kind of turn down the volume on that great question what we're looking at here is the ability to customize notifications on a per channel basis this is incredible we don't get to do this with email right you get an email that says you got a new follower on Twitter or someone endorsed you on LinkedIn it's really great but I don't need that to light my phone up right just as when I get an urgent email that says hey I need you to do this and it's run my boss that email comes to me and notifies me in the same exact manner in slack you can actually customize those notifications on the channels that you care about most so if you are in an active project and you're up against a deadline you can dial up those notifications hit me with a desktop notification if I don't respond to that send me a mobile push notification if I don't respond to that then and only then send me an email so I don't lose track of anything but if this is a fun channel like the maybe Food & Drink channel where people share new restaurant recommendations I don't need to know about that all the time so I'm going to crank down the notifications on that one how many of you folks are already doing this and customizing your notification preferences all right that's a good handful of folks so this is kind of going back to the question mentioned earlier that's great how can I now I know how to focus my attention on what I care about but there's a lot of other channels that I care about but I don't need to be notified proactively all the time so we have some tips on that end as well conversations in slack just like in real life are fluid they happen they end they move on we go on to the next thing and it's a really fluid conversation right and so in slack we make it really easy for you to join the channels that are important to you but also leaf right so a good example is within our slack team we have tons of help channels help IT help benefits finance etc you go in there you have a quad you ask your benefits related question you get a great answer and then you can leave that channel and you no longer have to have that sitting on your left-hand side but the next time you have a benefits question it's very easy for you to jump back in there and ask the question I will admit the first time I created a channel and I saw someone leave because you can see all that every time someone joins in leaves a channel you can see it it's all tracked it was a little bit sad I was like does my channel not matter to you but it actually saves all of us a lot of productivity if we're just in the ones that matter to us the most but sometimes you don't want to take it quite as far as to leave the channel completely you still care about it but you just don't want it to turn bold every single time someone's posting a new question or has something new to share in that channel so if you don't want to go so far as to leave the channel or you don't want to hurt someone's feelings you can mute the channel and that's just by doing /mute and so this is what I do for channels where I want to get those proactive notifications based on my highlight words but I don't want it to turn bold for me I only want to check it when I'm being triggered right so our Zendesk channel is a great example all of the tickets that come in from our customers pipe into our Zendesk channel it's one of the apps that we have installed on our team and so it's great because any time one of my customers again going back to that example writes in I'm going to get that notification but I don't need to turn it to have it turn bold every single time so that's one that I have muted we have a sales events channel so every time someone purchases slack that gets recorded but I don't need to know about that all the time I can check that on my own time over the weekend after work etc so that's a muted channel our kyvan channels this is really really great when for example you are working on a project and it's a really active conversation for example when we were planning for this event today we had a channel where all of us across the company were working together planning etc but once the event ends we do a post-mortem we gather feedback we have stats we're going to go ahead and archive that channel because it's not an active conversation that we want to have people continue to be a part of archiving the channel means that all the contents in that channel will be archived searchable reference later for the next event that we put on but it's not going to be an open conversation that new people on your team can join important distinction is if the channel is no longer relevant for just you you want to leave the channel like we talked about earlier if it impacts everyone who's participating in that channel you're going to want to archive we had someone on our team who on their first day at SLAC where it's in one of our fun channels and I'm not going to look at it because I don't want to call him out he's in the room but he accidentally he was in a fun challenge it's like oh this is great but I want to focus on my work so I'm gonna archive the channel and everyone got a notification and it was not a fun way to start a talk so now he knows and you all now know so that you don't have to make that same mistake so this next one was actually referenced earlier downstairs and some of you may already know about this but for the rest of us do not disturb is a really really great feature when you want to be heads down on focused sometimes we just need an hour to to step away from slack really work on a project or a deliverable that we're working on do not disturb as mentioned is one step to kind of get you in that direction so what you can do is actually click on that bell icon next to your team name and choose from one of our pre designated times and what this does is lets you actually snooze your notifications but more importantly it notifies everyone on the team with an indicator that you are currently in do not disturb mode you're being really focused so when they send you a message they're going to get a slack bot message that says hey Rachel is currently and do not disturb mode she's going to get this when she's back back online if something is urgent and they want to push through that they can also push through your do not disturb as well so you have that flexibility but this is really helpful to kind of be heads down and focus when you need to I'm curious how many folks are already using do not disturb or already knew about this before just now okay all right so I got a good one for all of our inbox zero fans in the room raise your hand if you're an inbox zero fan I am yeah so this feature is often unknown because it's kind of tucked away if you go to your preferences and advanced options under channel list we have a way for you to hide all channels with no unread activity unless they are starred so just to kind of go back here if you keep your eye to that right-hand sidebar you'll see that clean up really nicely it basically gets rid of anything that has unread activity and just gives you a lot of peace of mind for inbox zero fans this is huge and it's kind of a game for me to be like how can I read through all of my channels really quickly as I said conversations are fluid messages come in but you can't always take action on them right away maybe you're on your way to the office or you're in a meeting or on a call so we have a few tips on how you can come back to that message later on in time the first one is starring so I know we talked about stars earlier not to be confused with that any message in slack itself can actually be starred so this is a great way for you to pick out messages that are good reference items things you want to jump back to later so for example Carl made this ask for this update on the home page makeover I'm going to star that and then it's going to keep that on my Start items which sits right next to your add mention panel so this is a really nice way for you to kind of curate your list maybe think of it as bookmarks on your browser the really cool thing that I actually didn't know until very recently is that you can search just within your Start items so if you know like hey I know that the new comp plan was something that I starred I want to jump back to that really quickly in your search bar and we'll go to that in a bit you can actually say has star and it'll just search among your starred items which is really knit neat this one is one of my favorite features in slack which is the remind feature and you can actually make slack bot work for you so how do you do this all you need to do is do a slash remind and that's going to let know that you want to set a reminder and it's just really kind of plain syntax language remind me to share the updated results in 30 minutes slack bot is going to send you a confirmation message and then in 30 minutes he's going to ping you slack bot is actually non gender-specific so slack bot will ping you in 30 minutes to say hey share the updated results you can even do slash remind list and get a list of all the reminders that you set so remind me to drink water at 3 p.m. every day cool thing is you can also set reminders for other people on your team so if you're in a meeting and you want to say hey Jessica this action item is for you I'm just going to put send that to you in slack bot do slash remind at Jessica and the reminder the cool thing is when she completes that task or that action that confirmation comes to you as well which is really cool how many of you knew that already and are using that okay you got a good one alright so this is my other favorite feature is the ability to mark messages as unread and slack I'm still waiting for Apple to add this iMessage this is basically a way for you to mark any message in slack as unread so that you actually have that red badge notification that says hey you need to come back to this message so stars again are good for bookmarking but this is more for actually reminding you with a actual trigger to say come back to this at a later point in time any message can be can be marked as unread basically you just hover to the right there on the ellipses and then you'll see mark on red as an option so it's kind of more of that active reminder to jump back to a message when you're ready to take action now when you are ready to come back to a message the easiest way to do this is using our quick switcher this is by far my favorite or cut in slack and that's command K or Windows K if you're on a Windows machine once you click command K you get this pop-up which is our quick switcher and it's actually algorithmically made smart so that it surfaces to the very top the conversations that you are in the most so for example I talk in marketing team channel the most so you'll see even though it's not alphabetically-ordered correctly it's going to push that to the top because that's the one that I communicate in most often what you'll also notice about this pop-up is the channel naming convention that we have going on here this is our recommendation for any channel that you're naming put all of the related ones together with the first prefix same prefix so marketing - team marketing - events njet cetera the reason for this it really helps with channel discovery so if I'm not on the marketing team and I have a question about this event I might initially say oh yeah that should go in the marketing channel where 100 people communicate well once I start typing in marketing I'll see the marketing - events channel and say actually this is probably better for the 50 people that are in this channel because they actually care about marketing events more specifically and I'll get a quicker answer that way how many of you folks are already kind of coming up with this naming convention cool so the final thing before we move into how to actually use lock with your team is search and search is really really important because the more you communicate in slack the more slack becomes that archive for your team that brain right so the more information you have in there and the more you need to actually be able to search that really quickly this is also really helpful when new members join your team because they have access to this knowledge base of every conversation that was had before they joined whereas in a typical organization where you're not using slack you get an empty inbox and that's your day one and that's where you begin so in slack modifiers help you immensely because it allows you to filter your search results based on what it is that you do know so if you don't know how to get to the modifiers or if you don't memorize this screenshot which is okay you just need to put in a plus into your search bar in slack it's going to give you the same drop-down and you can use any one of these filters alone or you can combine them to make a really really refine search result so let's try one together here I'm going to look in my team for the word design I get nothing close to 9,000 messages and over 4,500 files I am NOT going to sit there and parse through all of these messages and files so the first thing I'm going to do is remove all of the messages from integrations and BOTS because I know for a fact that this was shared by a human and I want to look for it the next thing is I know that I was shared in the marketing team this was a marketing asset so it was likely shared in there so I'm going to use the in-channel modifier and sure enough I get down to 55 messages and just four files and the one that I'm looking for from CC is sitting right at the top so that is the way that you want to use search and I remember the first time that I started using modifiers it changed my world because it made it much more easier to actually get to the information that I was looking for as I mentioned earlier you can also put in your modifier has : stars so you want to just search within the start items that you've curated so some of you already have your entire team ons like how many of that how many of you guys okay a good number of you the rest of you guys maybe are starting out and the thing that's similar across all of our teams is that we're always going to have new people joining our team joining your company that have to be introduced to slack so hopefully some of these tips will help you along those friends the first one is if you haven't started using a stock with your entire company or maybe you are not yet at the point where you want to synchronize your Active Directory this is something that can potentially help with your launch day and really help you streamline your overall onboarding process on our paid plans standard and plus we have what we call slack user groups and you can think of user groups very similar to distribution lists it's a group of people that need usually have to have the same access to information so your engineering user group your design user group maybe your Android team your accounts team and you're in a larger Channel and you want to call them out specifically you can use user groups to do that the second benefit of user groups is the ability to actually synchronize those or excuse me set default channels for those users oops so if I'm an engineer on my first day I don't get added to slack and just have my general and my random Channel I get access to the five engineering specific channels that I need to have access to on a continuous basis going back to Active Directory you can actually synchronize your ad groups and map those to the slack user groups that you have which is really great I see some heads nodding which is cool the benefit of synchronizing with your ad is twofold for the end user it's one less username and password that you need to remember for the admin it really secures your provisioning and de-provisioning process so it creates much less headache and as you're thinking about creating your space and bringing on the rest of your team we have a few tips on how to actually set up your space so that when new members join your team it's very clear to them how they're expected to communicate in your team and also they have some information there that's already prepared to help them so what am I talking about usually we recommend having your general channel your general channel I don't know if everyone knew this already but it's the one channel that everyone is mandatorily required to be a part of you can't leave that one so it's great to transform that into your announcements channel where you want to post things that are really important for everyone on your team to read and so in that channel maybe having a post like this that welcomes them into slack for the first time and has a post like the gentleman mentioned about key things that you want your team to know about slack so this might be those channel naming guidelines key kind of etiquette and slack one thing that I heard from a customer was we came up with our like slack etiquette guidelines right so with any tool you want to kind of set some ground rules one of them that I thought was really interesting it was actually referenced earlier is not just saying direct messaging someone is saying hi are you there and waiting for them to come back because now you've grabbed my attention but I don't have anything to respond to so instead of doing that saying hi this is the question that I have and leave that for them and send that all to them in one message so that they can see the context of what your ask is and respond to you much more efficiently channel naming guidelines also help avoid channel duplication if fifteen people on your marketing team joined they're like oh there's no marketing channel I'm going to create one now you have 15 different marketing channels that you have to clean up and that's not fun and then for the folks that already have your entire team on slack we recommend creating a help slack channel and that's really useful because everyone can go there to ask their slot questions and then your power users your cells will be there ready to answer their questions how many of you already have a Help slack channel cool all right so you've got your team on slack they're like all right you've convinced me I'm going to try this thing out asking people to asking people to change the way that they work it's not easy they've been using the same methods for communicating with their teams for decades and you're asking them to completely transform that change is hard none of us like it so we have a few recommendations on how to make that a little bit easier we've had some people in the audience already share on how they did that some things that we saw work really well is to make it a little bit more fun so what you see here in the middle is our slack day poster just like you wouldn't see a movie hit theaters without months and months and months of trailers precluding that proceeding going up to that you don't want to just say hey starting from today you all are using slack you kind of want to get the word out there get them excited help them understand what to expect when they're going to start using sock and you can go in and kind of prepare it and that way there's information that's waiting for them when they jump in so some actual live customer examples of this BuzzFeed is one of our customers and they actually created for them it was really important that everyone had the mobile app installed very much like you shared that's a really big part of the slack experience because you can actually start communicating with your team without having to directly be at your desk and so for them because that was so important they decided to on their slack day go around and check everyone's phones if you had the slack app installed they actually made custom slack cocktails called the channel back message if you had it on your phone then you got a drink which is pretty cool Marketo is another example they recently launched slack and they created a user checklist and it was the 10 most important things that you need to do in slack and every new user got this it was upload your profile photo maybe add a few more bits of information to your custom profile fields I'm cher which office you're part of things like that and once you finish that checklist you could go into the help select channel and say hey I'm done I did this and that was usually their first message that they posted in a public Channel and the first 50 people actually got a pair of slacks so that was really cool and it actually got them in the habit of using slack just like Microsoft the on the first versions of Windows they actually installed solitaire and freecell on there not because they wanted people to play games and card games at work it was because they wanted to get people comfortable with using the mouse and moving around on the screen and so that's why they put that there and so it's a similar kind of concept where you want to get people interested and kind of in the habit of starting to use slack some other examples are customers who actually got their CEO to do and asked me anything in am a in a slack channel and that got people communicating out in the open they could see oh wow this person asks the question that I actually had the same question and because they asked that in the public channel I get to see the answer and that light bulb moment gets to go off so let's move on to how to actually this is really for the folks in the room that are really starting at the beginning wanting to get your team onto slack as we mentioned change can be difficult and we're asking people to change the way that they work you might be sitting in your seat and thinking this is going to be really hard we have a lot of people who love email who love outlook at my company I can't imagine how we're actually going to get them all on board you all have heard some great tips already but when you're starting off we recommend that you start small don't feel like you have to get every single person on your company on slack tomorrow we suggest actually starting with a small this is really great because you can actually test this out with a small group of people at your company see if this is going to work what works well what doesn't work well and then extrapolate that to the rest of your company or your organization the other nice part is you know starting small get the feedback and being able to share that with the rest of the team when the rest of your team joins slack there's already some content there where they can get the context of oh this is how we're going to use slack this is how we communicate on this tool one of the tips that we actually heard and learn from a customer is a concept of using slack on a specific day of the week so for them it was slack Fridays and their overall mission and their goal was to move all of their internal communication from email to slack but like some of you in the room may be feeling that felt overwhelming and it felt like they weren't going to be able to do that on day one so they chose Friday's on Fridays they were like you guys instead of email let's try communicating on slack slowly but surely everyone started realizing hey this is actually a much easier way for us to communicate with each other we're going to just move over completely and it was kind of that small network effect but it doesn't have to all happen on one day overnight you can also try running short term projects on slack we've seen this work really well where it's like a two to three week project you say hey this is a really cool opportunity for us to actually put slack to the test use the free plan anyone can create it and use it for however long you like with however many people and you can actually use slack to create channels for your project maybe pin important documents like design specs and notes and actually share those within the channel how many of you all are doing stand-up meetings or your status update meeting is in slack okay so we're starting to see this actually on many many projects and not just developer teams you might have seen people say slack helped me reduce meetings and the reason is because a lot of those information sharing and gathering meetings that we all have every single week recurring can actually be moved to slack and you don't have to step away from your desk you don't have to dial in and spend five minute setting up a conference call you can actually just do that in slack so the way to do that is one of the ways is actually to use that remind feature that I talked about earlier so you can say slash remind this channel so this is let's just say the account steam channel remind account steam to post their update every day at 10 a.m. every weekday at 10 a.m. and slack bot will come in here and just ping the channel and say hey share the three things that you're working on today and any blockers that you may have this is really great for everyone because what people don't really confess is that when you're doing those in person you're not really listening to what your team members are sharing right because you're thinking what did I work on yesterday what can I share so this is really nice everyone gets to think about it thoughtfully and actually document that and it's nice to reference later on when you need to someone shared this earlier about using the emojis but we actually use this at slack a lot and this is actually really helpful for cross-functional collaboration so as you can see on here Todd is actually asking Mari to review a security questionnaire and he's communicating the urgency of the status with that red emoji for us a white emoji is just a question or feedback it's not urgent blue is I like an answer within a few days but it's not super super urgent right now Mari will comment back and communicate that she's looking at it with the eyeball emoji and that's just one last message that needs to get posted to that entire channel for everyone to check so the eyeballs communicate I'm looking at this and then once the issue is resolved or the security question area is done and reviewed she'll put a white checkmark there so this is a really great way to kind of make it easier for different parts of your organization to communicate with each other in a really efficient way and what's nice about this is you don't necessarily have to be in the same office working together face-to-face you can still get your jobs done really really easily all right so now let's fast-forward you've got your entire team on board into slack how can you actually help them see slack as a place where important information is being communicated it it's not just another tool to check we recommend posting company-wide announcements updates from leadership a really cool example that I actually heard from a customer they were thinking about how do I make people come back to slack on day two how do I make slack sticky a place to return one idea like the gentleman shared is to post cookie updates another idea is this company in particular created a leadership channel and they put captain they just designated someone every single week to post a question about leadership essentially to start a discussion around a topic that they cared about and it was really cool because they started to see people come there as a place to have discussions and conversations with their colleagues about something that they all cared about and then once the week was over the person passed the question on or the baton on to someone else within the company where they could ask the questions and start up the discussion that way in this example we're announcing new announcements promotions things like that you'll see people had a lot of fun with the emoji reactions congratulating them imagine all of this all these congratulations good job yeah happy for you all of that coming in as an individual email that would be nuts and so instead of doing that or posting that into stock individually you can actually just use reactions to show your support for your colleagues all right I'm going to kind of skip through this a little bit for the sake of time but generally we recommend communicating as much as possible in the channels openly this goes back to the theme of transparency that has already been brought up today but really being able to share your information and and your knowledge with the rest of your team of course confidential conversations do need to happen at slack we absolutely use slack for everything every single private sensitive conversation it happens on slack I get zero emails absolutely zero and so hiring discussions compensation conversations all that will happen in private channels alright so the Bob converse a ssin is happening downstairs but as a lot of you have mentioned the integrations are really really helpful it's kind of the next level where you see slack bringing the tools that you're using at work together in one place so slack comm slash apps this is our app directory April mentioned it earlier as well this is where you can go to find integration and apps with a lot of the tools that you're already using Zendesk Twitter github robot envoy stripe etc we recommend you know maybe even during a pilot going ahead and installing the apps that your team already uses so that when your team joins for the first time they can actually see all those integrations so some of my favorite ones for example Zendesk I already mentioned this but anytime one of my customer writes in I know about it anyone in your company can see the tweets that are going out about maybe a new feature that your company is released or a new update that you've released you don't have to be in the marketing team to get that update if you go to slack comm slash apps you'll also see these categories on the left-hand side this is a really great way to discover new apps as well so if you're looking for something related to guests check-in so when people check in and are trying to meet with you you can actually get that update through a tool called Envoy for example we have nice categories for you to kind of sort and find the apps that you're looking for more easily there are now over 300 apps so categories and stuff like this helps a lot but every single team and company is a little bit different and your needs may be different so for that we actually have bot kits and api's to help you customize your slack even further so what you see here is a slack bot it's actually a custom slash command and we actually have this within our own flock team you may be familiar with the use case where someone says hey I have a buddy at Global gadgets and he wants to use lock who should I put him in touch with who's working with global gadgets at our what we did is cut this up on the back end with our crm tool so anyone in the company can do slash accounts type in the name of the company and you'll actually get a slack bot private message that lets you know who within your organization is working with them and if you actually want to see this live at our helpdesk afterwards you can go in and actually see this installed on some of our demo teams when you see down here is actually an example of something that our business operations team built this is a daily update that updates every four hours so it's not very updates every four hours and reports back on the key performance indicators that we have set for ourselves as goals and so typically this would come into a data warehouse where your data team might see it but the rest of your company wouldn't see that you might get that in a weekly or monthly company update but you don't get a daily pulse of how you're progressing this integration or this bot is really helpful for that all right so we're on our last section fostering your team culture and slack so far until now we've all been talking about kind of productivity tips how you can actually be more productive be more efficient and slack we talked about how to prepare for your launch day how to introduce your team to slack how to synchronize your user groups or set up user groups and some use cases on how to get started and of course how to install those apps that your team already uses so for the last portion which is going to be a bit shorter we're going to talk about how to actually use slack to make your working life more pleasant as well so a lot of you have already started doing this with the coffee bot and examples like that but slack is really useful for building relationships within your team I think more and more the way that the working world is changing is we're not communicating and working with each other in the same office how many of you regularly work with colleagues and other offices or other locations or maybe you're in a remote office that's a lot of us and so getting to know your teammates more personally helps you to feel a bit more engaged and actually brings all of you a bit closer together a story that I heard from a customer was yeah I introduced lack to my team because I'm a remote employee in Utah I used to be the last one to find out about anything now using slack we all find out at the same time together during the panel what I thought was really interesting was when I think it was Jay from Pixar talked about feedback and recognition and being able to highlight our colleagues when they're doing something great and also being inspired by it and so we like to give and track kudos in slack and we think that slack hopefully will help you do this a little bit more easily because feedback is something we want to do we want to be able to recognize each other when there's good work being done but it's not always easy to stop and do that so here are two examples on how you can do this in slack the one on the bottom here is a third-party app from our app store called grow bot and basically what it does is it tracks the highlight words props and kudos and any time that's tracked it's going to make a record of it it also tracks how many reactions those messages actually get so when it's time for performance reviews you're not thinking hey what kind of you know work did I do six months ago because that's not very easy to remember all the time you actually have a nice record of that throughout the entire time you were working with your team and slack but if you don't want to use a third-party app you can also very easily just do this negatively in slack by creating a kudos channel and just calling out your colleagues when they're doing great work or helping you out or anything like that someone mentioned an introductions channel we also have something similar we call it a yay Channel and we celebrate all fun things so anniversaries birthdays your first day at slack we also ask that you write a little blurb about yourself who you are where you're coming from which team you're on what your interests are and that kind of is a nice way for them to get to know other people in their team and lastly you know we're using slack for work and we're having a lot of conversations that are work-related but it's also nice to have some fun non-work-related channels as well we call these affinity groups and so someone in there yay intro might say I'm really into coffee and skiing and hiking you might very easily see someone say hey you should join our hiking channel or someone might say I just I have a two-year-old son he's not getting a lot of sleep lately they might invite you into the parent land channel which is a private channel where parents ask questions share best practices tips and tricks and commiserate about how little sleep they're getting so we're nearing the end here and someone mentioned it's hard to go find new restaurants around your office right you end up going to the same place again and again I go to Chipotle and fresh roll probably every single week so we'll wrap up with one last fun example Foursquare actually has a slash command in slack where you can do slash Foursquare type in your address or your air coordinates and it'll actually give you in the public channel a bunch of recommendations and then people can vote and choose their favorite restaurant for lunch that day which is pretty fun so let's recap because there was a lot of information that was shared today in sections 1 & 2 we really talked about how you can work in slack and how you can bring the rest of your team on to slack really thinking about ways to be more productive all those tips and tricks and hacks that I told you I love we gave you tips on staying focused how to manage the signal-to-noise ratio how to customize your notifications based on what you care about and then we talked about strategies for training your team and introducing them to slack for the first time getting the rest of your team on board and then finally we talked about ways to grow your team culture and slack and how slack potentially help with that I hope this was helpful for you this was great I really appreciate you guys joining and participating in the conversation I learned a bunch I hope this was helpful for you I think next we have time for networking and just having fun we also have our help desk which is just around the corner so if you have any deeper dive questions about anything we cover please come and find us there hey you

Channel: Slack

Views: 107,687

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Id: v3SjMoiKTro

Length: 43min 56sec (2636 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 01 2016