Slack is a workplace communication solution that allows your teams to easily send messages, files, and other information. Its instant messaging capabilities have made it popular because it provides faster and often more casual communication compared to email. Slack can boost productivity and is a great collaboration tool for your workforce. It can also help you convey the feeling of your company’s culture in a virtual environment.
There are two ways to send messages on Slack: via a Slack channel, which is like a group chat, or via direct message, which is more like a text message. Once you send a message, the other people will receive a notification and can then respond in real time. And if you’d rather discuss something with a colleague directly rather than typing it out, you can invite them to a huddle, which is an informal audio call with optional video and screen-sharing capabilities.
Since its public launch in 2013, Slack has become one of the most popular workplace collaboration tools. According to the company, Slack is used by over 100,000 organizations, including 77 of the Fortune 100 companies. This quick rise to success is what led Salesforce to acquire Slack for approximately $27.7 billion in 2021.
Slack is well known for its integration capabilities. There are over 2,000 Slack integrations, including Salesforce, Google Calendar, GitHub, Loom, Pitch, and flair. Adding Slack integrations and apps enhances Slack’s capabilities, giving you more tools in one place to streamline your processes. Some Slack apps feature bot users, which are chatbots that can send messages and post in channels. For example, Google Drive will send you a Slack message when someone shares a document with you, and Slack’s very own Slackbot will send you reminders to reply to messages or suggestions to leave channels that you rarely use.
You can use Slack for free, but your message history will be limited to the previous 90 days and you will only be able to add 10 apps or integrations. If you decide you want to upgrade, there are three options: Pro, Buinsess+, and Enterprise Grid.
What about the pricing? Well, the Pro package begins at €6.75 per user per month when you purchase annually, but €8.25 if you pay monthly. Business+ includes more features and costs €11.75 per user per month annually or €14.10 monthly. For information about the Enterprise Grid, you'll need to contact a direct representative of the Slack team.
Let’s do the math: If you have 1,000 team members using Slack and purchase the Pro plan, you could be looking at a minimum of €81,000 a year. So you might be wondering, is it worth it?
Slack is an excellent tool for collaborating with your team members. The ability to add pictures, GIFs, and emojis makes workplace communication more fun. But it also improves efficiency with the ability to comment in threads and see if the person you want to contact is online, away, in a meeting, sick, or on vacation.
Faster communication also fosters increased project coordination and encourages conversations. For remote workers, office socialization is especially difficult to accomplish yet becomes increasingly essential in the future of work. For example, new employees who started virtually often have a more challenging time forming relationships with coworkers than employees who were able to onboard in person. Slack can help overcome this hurdle and make everyone feel included.
Slack integrations allow you to combine notifications from different tools into one place. Many integrations even allow you to trigger actions in another tool directly from your Slack window. For example, if someone shares a Loom video with you, you can receive a notification in Slack and either watch the video immediately or add it to your Watch Later list. This can streamline your work processes, help you keep on top of notifications, and reduce the need to hop between apps.
Managing teams of people can be an overwhelming task, especially when there are so many different ways to stay connected. However, Slack stands out from the crowd due to its many great features.
There are two types of channels on Slack: public channels and private channels. In a public channel, messages are publicly available for the entire team to read. Public channels can be things like #General, which might include general work-related topics, or #Random, which might consist of anything from sports talk to news around the local town. By adding channels like these, HR professionals can really help create a good workspace atmosphere, which is especially relevant for fully remote teams and employees working from home. Departments and teams within the company can also have their own public channels to share information related to their line of work.
Private channels are not open to all team members. You must be invited by someone already within the private channel before you can access it. For example, this could be useful for onboarding, as it could allow new hires to ask their questions in a private space. Whereas for the other employees, this is less relevant, as these FAQs are already common knowledge.
During onboarding, HR teams will typically give new starters a list of public and private channels they should join. This helps create a sense of belonging, keeps newbies up to date with the latest in the company, and makes sure that they know who to go to if they have a question.
Slack is useful for its messaging capabilities alone, but it becomes much more powerful when you add apps and integrations. By integrating an HR tech solution like flair into Slack, HR teams can be more productive by handling their core tasks from one app. For example, using flair’s Slack app, you can clock in, clock out, take breaks, and request absences without leaving Slack.
There are many benefits to keeping your employee engagement rate high. For one, people who are happy with their jobs perform better. Engaged employees are also less likely to miss work, create conflict in the workplace, or quit altogether. With Slack, there are many opportunities to improve employee engagement.
Did you know that you can build your own bot on Slack? For example, you can configure your Slackbot to welcome new employees and send them onboarding documents. You can also define custom responses, so if someone asks the question “What’s the Wi-Fi password?” Slackbot will automatically answer them with a response of your choice. There are so many ways that Slackbot can be automated to solve these frequently asked questions every day.
There are also many free bots that you can add to Slack to make the employee experience more engaging. Many companies use a coffee break bot, for example. This bot randomly select two (or three) employees once a week to encourage them to meet up for a quick informal coffee and chat. This gives coworkers a better chance to get to know each other by pairing them with someone they may not have otherwise had the opportunity to hang out with. The result? A stronger team culture.
Slack can also help you keep on top of your notifications. You know that feeling when someone sends you a query just a few minutes before you clock out for the day? If it’s not urgent, you can tell Slack to send you a reminder the following morning or at a time when you are able to respond. This prevents smaller tasks and questions from slipping through the net on a busy day.You also consider setting up a public channel for employee recognition. Having a channel named something like #kudos or #celebration gives your employees a place to share birthday messages or highlight great work that a colleague has done. We’re big fans of employee recognition at flair, which is why we created our Cheers feature to encourage employees to send motivational messages to one another.
Your favorite mobile apps probably make your day-to-day a bit more fun and organized. The same can be true for Slack apps. And just like with your phone’s apps, you can easily download and integrate them into your Slack workspace.
First of all, adding flair to your Slack can help your track time and manage absences. If you’re a manager, you can quickly accept or reject time off requests without leaving Slack. Your employees will no longer have to wait to see whether their PTO request is accepted.
Monday.com is perfect for performance management. Monday.com is its own separate project management application, but its Slack app allows you to create tasks or new projects using Slack. Alerts on Monday.com also go out automatically to your HR teams as Slack notifications. This keeps everyone in touch no matter which application they have open.
Then there’s standuply, a popular Slack app for human resources professionals that functions as a digital assistant. It provides automation of many common workflows, syncs across time zones, tracks project progress, and a lot more.Aside from these, there are many more great Slack apps out there. With a bit of exploration, you are sure to find one that can help meet your company’s specific needs.
What is a Slack Community? Slack Communities are a bit like Facebook Groups or LinkedIn Groups. Like these social media networks, they allow you to connect with people who have similar interests, discuss new topics and trends, share information, network, and much more. People are happy to interact and engage with questions and posts.
You can find Slack communities to join by searching Reddit, Slofile.com, or Google. Once you find a community you’re interested in, you can join it by applying on the community’s webpage.
Plenty of these communities are perfect for HR professionals. Below is a list of my favorite Slack communities related to HR:
Slack creates a sense of community and lowers barriers to communication. For HR, it’s a useful tool to send alerts to your team in real time. For remote work, it’s an effective way to convey company culture and help everyone stay social together virtually. It can help the whole organization keep in touch and increase productivity. There are many Slack app integrations that can lead to a highly personalized experience for your company. Thanks to this high degree of customization and broad set of collaborative features, Slack is a fantastic communication tool for startups and enterprises alike.
Slack integrations can help you streamline your workflow and improve productivity. With hundreds of app integrations available, you can connect your favorite tools and apps directly to Slack which can help you stay organized and work more efficiently.
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