Visual communication platform Canva needed a way to help its 2,000 globally distributed employees stay connected. The company has continued to experience astronomical growth—hitting a 130% year-on-year increase in users with over 60 million people around the world using Canva each month. As the company grew at such a rapid rate, teams turned to Slack, a channel-based messaging app, to run asynchronous stand-ups, foster a sense of community and focus on spending more time achieving its “crazy big goals.”
Canva soon found Workflow Builder—a visual tool that lets anyone create custom code-free workflows and automate day-to-day processes in Slack. With workflows designed to suit how you work, teams don’t have to rely on email threads, missed calls or meeting notes to keep up. Instead, Canva’s teams could capture everyone’s status and updates, then add the information to a Google Sheet to ensure visibility, alignment and context-sharing across the company.
Ensuring alignment and context-sharing regardless of timezones or work hours with Slack
As workplaces become a hybrid between the digital and physical, every company is now needing to rethink the employee experience and find a better way that’s right for them.
Progressive leaders focus more and more on team alignment as drivers of success, especially with remote teams. If everyone’s pulling in the same direction, things happen faster and decisions are smarter.
Disconnecting from a physical office building allows an organisation to recruit beyond a defined geographic area. With async work practices in place, collaboration can still happen, regardless of where and when everyone works from. After all, diverse teams consistently outperform their homogeneous counterparts.
Before integrating Slack’s Workflow Builder, Canva’s finance team spent an average of 1.5 hours per week in stand-ups, adding up to 67.5 hours per week across the team.
For a rapidly growing team juggling multiple priorities and time zones, it needed a way to have more asynchronous conversations and decision-making while spending time on more impactful work and reaching their “crazy big goals.” Canva’s solution? Pre-built workflows in Slack.
“With Workflow Builder, the Finance team now spends 5 minutes per week updating their status. The total time savings per week is 63.75 hours across the team, which we’re able to spend focusing on the impactful projects that add value for our team and community around the globe.”
Proactively redesigning these processes also helped Canva incorporate new ways for the rapidly growing team to get to know one another in a remote environment. “Adding a fun question such as ‘Who is your kindred spirit?’ and moving to a fortnightly meeting focused on celebrating our wins and sharing kudos has been really impactful,” says Plank.
With Workflow Builder, Canva employees (aka Canvanauts) are able to spend less time in meetings and more time focusing on impactful work, context-sharing and team bonding. The result?
Engaged, productive and efficient teams, cross-functional partnerships that can tackle problems together and less context-switching thanks to app integrations and in-channel communications. [# /]
Want to learn more about how to automate team processes? Get certified in Workflow Builder.
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