Discover How Slack Powers Productivity
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain the fundamentals of productivity and working in Slack.
- Describe the benefits of automation, apps, knowledge sharing, and communication in Slack.
- Explain how the Slack platform transforms productivity.
The Reality of Productivity
Productivity looks drastically different than it did 100 years ago. It's even different from one or two years ago since productivity evolves with the technology and tools we use to achieve it.
What remains critical to productivity, however, is the interaction between people, tools, and information. Software companies that conduct online research to find the right fit for products aren’t that different from farmers who followed almanacs and tilled fields with manual machines. The tools have changed. The source of data has shifted. But the alignment between them and people remains.
So what does productivity look like today? How do businesses measure and improve productivity when the factors that go into it aren’t always clear cut and are becoming more specific to your business? We’ve reached a point where people, tools, and information exist across so many places and formats that productivity is hard to pin down and work toward.
A platform like Slack—a productivity platform to be more specific—gives those factors a way to work in harmony to generate real and clear results.
Use Slack As Your Productivity Platform
Unlike email and even other collaboration software, Slack acts like connective tissue between teams, tools, information, and more. They can all “speak” to each other thanks to the way work happens in channels.
A channel is a dedicated space for a topic, project, or team where people can come together to communicate, share information, make decisions, and more. Think of them like digital rooms where you can meet up, store important files, and work in tandem with each other. Channels appear in the Slack sidebar #like-this. A typical organization might have channels like the following.
- Announcements channels like #announcements-amer or #all-hands for company-wide updates
- Team channels like #sales-team or #product-team for high-level team communication
- Project channels like #launch-website or #proj-alpha to see projects through start to finish
- Support channels like #help-biztech or #help-benefits to request resources or ask questions
- Social channels like #pets or #parents where people can bond and share what matters to them
When used to their full capacity, Slack channels foster knowledge-sharing and information transparency across your organization. That’s because content in public channels—the decisions your team makes, the data you share, the questions you ask and answer—is accessible, searchable, and findable to everyone.
Channels are the foundation of what makes Slack a true productivity platform. Yet as powerful as they are, they’re just the tip of the iceberg.
Automate for All
To drive productivity, you want to bring the power of human collaboration and technology closer together. That’s where automation comes in.
In Slack, automation happens through workflows, automated multi-step tasks or processes that you can set up with or without code. While automation may sound technical, 80% of Slack workflows are built by non-technical users. With a few clicks, anyone can create a workflow to take on a range of tasks. People have built workflows in Slack to automate all sorts of things that are a regular part of their work like:
- PTO requests
- Sourcing IT support
- Data entry
- Syncing with other systems
- Sharing next steps
- Stand-up meetings
- Sales team alerts
- Feedback gathering
- Budget approvals
- And many more!
Workflows can even connect with or trigger actions in other tools and services to help Slack users see a twenty-six percent increase in time saved. If productivity is all about measurements, well, we think that’s a pretty notable number.
App-ly Yourself
Most of us use anywhere from five to 50 apps every day to do our jobs. These are the modern-day tools that allow us to be more productive. But what if the way we used them could be more productive as well?
Slack integrates with over 2,600 apps, ranging from your favorite calendar and project management tools to AI apps and Einstein 1 solutions. With apps plugged right into Slack, you don’t have to switch back and forth between windows to finish tasks, start a meeting, or move work forward. Alerts, notifications, and actions are right where you’re already working. You can even incorporate apps into Slack workflows to take your automations to the next level.
As Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield noted, “Slack is the two percent of your technology budget that makes the other ninety-eight percent more valuable.” Slack doesn’t replace your tools. It brings them into a unified experience to help you stay focused and work more efficiently.
Knowledge is Power
Did you know that Slack stands for Searchable Log of All Conversations and Knowledge? Beyond being a clever acronym, this captures what makes working in Slack so transformative.
Let’s go back for a moment to channels. They’re where your company’s knowledge and data come together. In the past, this was scattered across mediums—buried in emails, living on someone’s desktop, lost in translation. In Slack, this becomes part of a searchable archive. That means anyone, from new hires to the people who’ve been at your company since its beginning, can search and find what they need. Channels allow people to search for specific files and conversations and catch up on project and team histories. This doesn’t require a fancy plug-in. This isn’t an add-on feature. It’s fundamentally how Slack works.
The centralized repository of institutional knowledge that lives in Slack—conversations, files, video clips, links, and more—makes up your organization’s collective brain. Like our human brains, Slack gets better and smarter the more you work in it. So, let’s get to work!
Communication at the Core
Channels, workflows, super-powered search—these features are only useful if teams actually use them. And if you’ve ever been frustrated or disappointed with technology, you know it can make or break an experience. Engaged users lead to wider adoption. And higher adoption creates a bigger impact. That’s where Slack really shines.
Slack is inherently conversational, making it easy for people to connect with each other. 91% of Slack users feel more connected to their teams and 89% say Slack has improved their communication*. With Slack Connect, internal teams can even work in Slack with their external partners, such as vendors, suppliers, and agencies.
Slack also makes work simple and pleasant. You can get quick answers from teammates in a channel instead of adding to a monster email chain. You can hop into impromptu huddles instead of scheduling another meeting. You can leave audio or video clips for coworkers in different time zones rather than trying to coordinate calendars. And if you haven’t experienced the power of emoji reactions yet, you’re in for a treat. 😮
Just by working in Slack, people naturally contribute to the most comprehensive and up-to-date knowledge base for your company. That’s on top of the great things they’re already creating for your business. Win-win.
The Potential of the Slack Platform
Remember that note about Slack acting like connective tissue? This isn’t only significant for your team, but also for your bottom line.
When key productivity contributors—automation, apps, knowledge, communication—work in tandem, they help the others get stronger. These effects compound to supercharge expected business outcomes. This potential impact multiplies, too. Mix and match these pieces endlessly in the Slack platform to discover new and specialized ways to impact your business.
With Slack, you can also control and adjust key productivity contributors to scale and maintain security, even on an enterprise level.
And we haven’t talked about the final cherry on top: the Slack platform connects with your customer information in Salesforce. This gives you a 360 degree view of customers that extends across all your applications and systems—and unlocks even more possibilities that we’ll uncover in the next module.
Slack is a fundamentally different approach to productivity. It’s software that answers the real needs of businesses today with flexibility to set them up for the future.
*Weighted average. Based on 2,220 survey responses from weekly Slack users in the U.S., UK, Australia, and Canada with a ± 2% margin of error at 95% CI (November 2022).