Global visual communications platform Canva is receiving Slack’s Excellence Award – Australia for using Slack to stay agile, build internal alignment and drive its award-winning business forward in the hybrid workplace.
One of the world’s fastest-growing software companies, Canva’s products have more than 85 million monthly active users and are used across 190 countries in more than 100 languages. The globally distributed Canva team doubled to just over 2,500 in the last year, with 1,350 ‘Canvanauts’ starting in 2021.
Since 2016, the company has used Slack, the channel-based messaging app, to scale its productivity platform and bring its core values to life every day, including ‘make complex things simple’, ‘set crazy big goals’ and ‘empower others’. In 2021 alone, Canvanauts sent more than 36 million messages in Slack.
Canva has thousands of Slack channels for teams, clubs, projects, office locations and discussions. With Slack Connect, Canva can work faster with its external partners in a way that feels as straightforward and fluid as collaborating with its in-house teams.
During the pandemic, as their workplace shifted to a hybrid model, Canva leaders reimagined the employee experience to focus on team alignment and ensure that everyone was empowered to move in the same direction and make smarter decisions, faster. For example, Canva’s finance team previously spent an average of 1.5 hours per week in huddle meetings. Since integrating Slack’s Workflow Builder, Canvanauts save 63.75 hours per week and can make time for more impactful work.
Moving work forwards by staying agile and building camaraderie
To track error incidents and discover issues within minutes, Canva’s internal infrastructure team uses the Sentry integration. To reach peak productivity, developers automate Jira ticket requests and simplify communication with their global offices via translation bots.
Repeatedly ranked as one of Australia’s best places to work, Canva even uses Slack to bring its quirky company culture to life. Recognising and celebrating colleagues is a team ritual made possible with Disco, an online culture platform that integrates with Slack. In 2021, Canva sent more than 14,000 #kudos messages.
By using Slack to scale and then pivot with the pandemic, Canva remains virtually unstoppable, driven by a hybrid workforce that’s empowered to ‘pursue excellence’ within a productivity platform.
