How to Optimize Slack for Remote Work

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work and remote teams have become increasingly more common. As such, businesses need to create integrations that facilitate successful collaboration among their distributed workforce who are unable to meet face-to-face. To do this, tools like Slack have been indispensable in the transition from the office to work from home.

At Knack, we have developed certain tips and tricks to optimize our use of Slack, ensuring smooth communication between our remote teams. By leveraging the right integrations, we are able to create an remote slack workspace that facilitates functionality and effective communication between our remote workers, allowing us to work with each other as if we were in the same room.

Slack is a great tool for project management and team collaboration It provides an easy way to collaborate with teams, manage tasks, and keep everyone on the same page even across different timezones. Slack’s channels and threads allow team members to quickly communicate, share ideas, and track progress. It also allows for easy integration with third-party apps, such as project management software, and makes it easy to assign tasks and track progress. Additionally, Slack’s notifications and reminders help keep everyone on track and up to date on project progress. Ultimately, Slack allows teams to streamline their communication and project management processes, making it easier to stay organized and stay on top of tasks within a virtual office.

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous

Slack is a great tool for facilitating instantaneous communication, but it can come at the cost of sustained productivity. The steady drumbeat of messages can quickly become a distraction and disrupt work-life balance. Between homeschooling, dog walking, and grocery shopping for grandma, COVID life is already distracting enough. As such, leveraging Slack as a synchronous (real-time) versus an asynchronous (time-delayed) communication tool should be given careful consideration.

You may want to commit to one type of use, or you may want to set guidelines for when Slack should be used in either fashion. For example, your company may want to treat Slack as an asynchronous tool for the first half of the day where folks aren’t expected to respond to Slack notifications right away. This will allow your team some dedicated heads down time and/or time to juggle other life happenings. Then, in the afternoon, you may transition to synchronous use where team members are expected to quickly respond to notifications in order to more instantaneously remove blockers and facilitate collaboration.

Here at Knack (a totally awesome no-code development platform), we default to asynchronous use. Although this approach minimizes distractions, it can mean a delay between asking a question and receiving a response. However, since this expectation is explicitly set, team members can work and plan accordingly. Additionally, because we recognize the value of intentional synchronous use, we encourage Knackleheads to explicitly request synchronous Slack availability if/when needed. (Knacktale hour, our virtual happy hour, being one such example.)

Public Posting vs. Private Posting

Slack is also great at facilitating both private direct messages and public messages with slack channels. This is another facet of Slack use that merits careful consideration.

At Knack, we default to public posts (visible to all employees or in dedicated channels) for a number of reasons. Public posts…

• Foster transparency
• Give more folks a chance to provide buy-in or feedback
• Eliminate the duplication of work or additional messaging
• Allow team leads to remove blockers or redirect focus as needed
• Give cross-departmental insight
• Foster broader collaboration

That said, we recognize that there are appropriate and necessary uses for private messaging. As such, private messaging isn’t prohibited, we just ask folks to default to public general channels as much as possible.

Using Mentions (aka @s)

Slack gives you the ability to leverage mentions to send explicit notifications to different individuals or groups. Mentions allow users to receive status updates:

• @[name] to get the attention of a specific person
• @[team] to get the attention of everyone associated with a specific team
• @here to get the attention of everyone online within a specific channel
• @channel to notify everyone in a specific channel regardless of whether or not they’re online

Setting explicit expectations for how to properly use mentions in Slack can also go a long way in minimizing distractions.

At Knack, we only mention an individual if their action or buy-in/feedback is needed. If we don’t need them to actively participate in the conversation or be aware of the exchanged information, then they aren’t mentioned. This allows the person in question to continue about their day without getting a distracting notification for a conversation they aren’t needed for. We take the same approach when deciding to mention everyone online or in a specific channel. The only time we mention everyone in a channel is for emergencies or for  broad company policy changes or updates that folks need to be immediately aware of.

Slack Integrations

Integrations with Slack offer a huge range of benefits and automations, allowing users to get more done with less effort. Integrations with tools such as Salesforce, Asana, Microsoft, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Zoom, Trello, and Dropbox and more, allow users to manage their projects and tasks more efficiently, collaborate with team members and external stakeholders, and access important documents and files quickly and easily.

Integrations with Slack also provide users with access to powerful analytics and reporting tools, allowing them to make better decisions and stay on top of the latest trends. Furthermore, integrations with Slack offer users the ability to stay connected and informed, with notifications and reminders ensuring that tasks are completed on time and with the highest level of quality.

Getting Social and Company Culture

Emojis are a great way to add a little fun and personality to communication within a company and build team culture. They can be used to show support and appreciation, express enthusiasm, and even lighten the mood during a stressful workday. They also provide a visual cue to help employees quickly understand the tone and meaning of a message. Using emojis in Slack can help foster a sense of community, improve morale, and increase productivity. They can also be used to communicate complex ideas in an easy-to-understand way, making communication more efficient. Overall, emojis can be a great way to add a little bit of fun to company culture.

Donut is a Slack app that remote teams use to recreate that moment of bumping into someone at the water cooler (or donut table) and striking up a conversation. It’s a little like getting a virtual coffee with someone. The Donut app helps teams bond and build relationships in unique ways. It randomly pairs colleagues for virtual coffee or lunch dates and encourages them to get to know each other better. It helps break the ice between coworkers who don’t know each other well, which can be especially important in distributed teams. It also helps strengthen existing relationships by providing an easy way to schedule informal check-ins with colleagues. This can also help to cultivate a more positive company culture by encouraging team members to be more open and communicative with each other.

Collaboration Beyond Work

Not only is Slack a great way to stay in touch for business collaboration purposes, but it’s also a great way to foster rapport and community.The interactions that these channels foster are invaluable, especially in light of current social distancing circumstances.

At Knack, we have many “fun” community channels including:

• Book-Club: Where we talk about what we’re reading, and where we facilitate our optional company book club participation
• Entertainment: Where we talk about movies, music, and TV
• Homebrew: Where we share recipes, pics of home renovations, and new beer brews
• Pets/Kids: Where we share pics and anecdotes of our extended families
• Quaranteam: Where we share stories or pictures of the activities that are keeping us sane, and where we support each other during the COVID-19 craze

Setting Personal Boundaries

Setting healthy boundaries between work and home life can be difficult; they’re even more difficult to establish when literally working from home. Slack can play a crucial role in helping to either preserve or erode those boundaries. Slack’s mobile app makes it an ideal tool for staying on top of work when you’re on the go, but it can also mean that you’re staying on top of work when you should be eating dinner with your family.

To ensure Knackleheads are unplugging and maintaining personal boundaries, we encourage every team member to leverage Slack’s notifications settings. Teammates can select when and how they receive notifications, set up Do Not Disturb windows, mute channels, etc. Not only does this maintain the health of a Knacklehead who may have just hopped off for the night, but it also affords others on the team to work in ways and at times that are best for them. With proper notification settings in place, our dev night owls can shoot off a mention to a success team member without concern that the recipient will feel inclined to hop on during their off hours.

Leveraging Slack Your Way

There is no denying that the world is a little hard to navigate at the moment. The way we think about and approach nearly every aspect of our lives has had to change. That said, current circumstances have afforded us the ability to reassess work communications. Taking the time to set expectations for use and to configure Slack’s settings accordingly will ensure that you’re using Slack in a way that caters to your team’s specific needs. If we carefully optimize remote communication tools, not only can our businesses continue to operate, but we can also build a sense of community that so many of us desperately need at this time.