Getting started for workspace creators

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.

Slack icon

Status suggestions

Profile fields

Help members to identify your workspace by uploading a Slack icon, such as your company logo.

Try it.

An image of an unicorn as your Slack workspace icon

You and your colleagues can let each other know what you’re up to by setting your Slack status. Set the default status suggestions that people in your workspace will be able to chose from.

Try it.

Choosing from three options to set your Slack status: in a meeting, off sick or on holiday

Profiles help colleagues to learn more about each other. Customise member profiles to share more details, such as location, start date and more. When colleagues edit their profile, they’ll see the new profile fields.

Try it.

Editing your location in your profile

 

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. Example of an announcements channel with a message sharing information about the launch of an employee portal

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. Example of a project channel with a message asking for feedback about a design document

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. Example of a social channel about dogs where someone has shared an adorable picture of their pup

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.

Showing the process to invite people to a workspace by selecting the option from the workspace menu in Slack

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.