A Slack workspace is a single place for your team and your work. If you haven’t already, enter your email address here to start creating a workspace.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to: Customise your workspace Create channels Invite people and get them up to speed

Tip: If you’re newer to Slack, read What is Slack? for a general overview of how things work. To join an existing workspace, take a look at Getting started for new Slack users.

Customise your workspace

As a workspace creator, you’ll hold the primary owner role. You’ll have access to customisation settings so that you can personalise the workspace for you and your team. Below are a few of our favourite ways to customise a new workspace.

Create channels

After customising your workspace, you can start creating channels. In Slack, conversations happen in direct messages (DMs) and channels. While DMs are for one-off discussions, channels are where the majority of work takes place.

For your first few channels, we recommend having ones for announcements, projects and something social. See the examples below for a few ideas.

#announcements

#project

#social

An announcements channel can be used to share critical information that everyone in the workspace should know.

Try it: Use the #general channel for announcements, as everyone invited to the workspace will be added to it automatically.

You can have ongoing, focused discussions about priorities and goals in project channels.

Try it: Keep work organised with channels for every project so that relevant conversations stay in one place.

Dedicate a channel for informal conversations about anything other than work.

Try it: Have a channel to discuss films, dogs, or films about dogs.

To make it simpler for your colleagues to find and join the right channels, we recommend creating guidelines for channel names and setting default channels.

Invite people and get them up to speed

Now that you’ve completed the basics to set up your workspace, you’re ready to invite your colleagues and get them familiar with Slack. Here are a few tasks that we recommend doing to get your colleagues up and running.

• Use this customisable template to introduce Slack to your team. If you already have a communication plan in place, include a link to our quick start guide.
• Read about the types of roles in Slack and think of people that you trust that can be workspace admins. They can help with administrative tasks to get the rest of the team on board.
• Invite people to your workspace! Click your workspace name and look for the Invite people to... option in the menu, or read more about inviting new members to your workspace.

Tip: To work with people from other companies in your Slack workspace, add them with Slack Connect.

Do more

Slack helps to keep conversations organised, especially if everyone on the team is using Slack as their default productivity tool. If you find that your colleagues continue to default to email or other tools, we have a few tips to help them transition to Slack.

• Connect other tools: You can connect other software, such as Google Calendar, Salesforce and Asana, to Slack. With all your tools in one place, it may help you and your team to switch between apps at work less often. Read our guide to apps in Slack to learn more.

• Forward emails to Slack: Slack can help you to keep all your work communication in one place, including emails. You can send emails directly to Slack conversations. For example, emails can be sent to your team’s channel or to the DM that you have with yourself. Read our article about sending emails to Slack to learn how.