Keeping your teams connected, engaged and productive wherever they are, with Slack

Technology analyst Benedict Evans recalls a time in recent history when we went from typing up our expense reports to typing them into a Word document form, then a Windows app form, then a webpage form—until finally someone realized we could simply take a photo of our receipt.

Discovering a “receipt photo moment,” or a transformative digital process, doesn’t merely save time and energy. It has the potential to determine the viability of a business as a whole. In fact, when the pandemic began, 79% of CIOs agreed that it would force their organizations to digitally transform faster than planned, according to the financial advisory firm J.P. Morgan.

During our Slack Frontiers 2020 virtual global conference, digital transformation was a core theme for many of our sessions and keynotes. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield kicked off the first day by encouraging companies to consider ways to automate processes and transform the way they conduct work, permanently.

“Everything we do at work is a workflow,” said Butterfield. “So instead of just looking for incremental improvements to steps 2 and 3 and 4, let’s look for big leaps, or entirely different ways to get where you want to go.”

As a channel-based messaging platform, Slack helps organizations keep teams connected, engaged and productive, no matter where they’re working from. Discover revolutionary ways your organization can conduct business and help your teams thrive when offices reopen.

Keep everyone connected

According to our recent survey of more than 9,000 knowledge workers, the top concern about remote work is staying connected and engaged. That’s where Slack channels—a single place to share files and messages—come in. 

“Channels make the messy work of people working with people so much easier,” Butterfield said. Unlike siloed inboxes, they bring everyone into the same space at the same time, so everyone is on the same page. This visibility is essential to building an open culture when everyone is apart. 

“We hear from customers that they’re working together more openly, are pushing decision-making down in the organization, and are achieving transparency and agility that was missing before,” said Tamar Yehoshua, Slack’s chief product officer. “They are able to be more flexible and improve collaboration for people across teams, geographies and life circumstances.”

What if you’re a new hire who’s never met any of your coworkers in the flesh? That’s the case for many employees in Slack’s product organization, where over a quarter of the team joined during the pandemic. If you’re unable to meet the people you’ll be working with, a company directory is an essential resource to get you up to speed. 

When we acquired Rimeto in July, we wanted to create a modern directory experience in tandem with Slack. Rimeto allows every employee to easily view and search their coworkers’ skills and experience, who has an upcoming start date, who has an anniversary or birthday, and who is on leave or returning from leave.

“With the addition of Rimeto to Slack,” said Yehoshua, “we’re combining engagement in channels with a reimagined company directory to give you a powerful cultural tool to strengthen employee ties to each other and to their work.”

Amplify company culture with engaged employees

Earlier this year, ViacomCBS found itself in an unprecedented situation—the company had to undergo a historic merger in the midst of a pandemic. According to Phil Wiser, ViacomCBS’s chief technology officer, a key driver of its technology team was to create “a new connected culture.”

Rolling out Slack to thousands of employees proved instrumental in keeping everyone aligned at a time of great change. “It’s not just adoption of technology; it’s transformation of the culture,” said Wiser.

Of course, the impacts of Slack are only possible because users are actively engaged with the software. To help you get the most out of Slack, we’re introducing a set of analytics capabilities that reveal the depth of Slack use in an organization and where users are engaging the most. With our new Analytics API, you can reach broader goals, like alignment and a culture of connection, by understanding more about how your employees engage with Slack.

Increase productivity by connecting your tools

The average enterprise uses more than 1,000 tools every day. And while best-of-breed software is a requirement to get things done, countless “productivity gaps,” as Butterfield put it, now exist when employees are focused on “providing the [human] bridge between specialized software tools.” Constantly switching between tools and tasks could cost 40% of your productivity every day.

Wiser believes that Slack is the “neutral overlay” that connects his company’s tools and systems together. “We have about 700 apps that are now integrated into Slack,” he said. “This supercharged and accelerated our ability not just to have people communicating, but also to share knowledge and information in a way that was not possible when they were sitting in silos of those 700 applications.”

That ability to easily share information thanks to a connected platform has dollar return, too: A recent Forrester analysis of the Total Economic Impact of Slack showed that the teams surveyed reported a 338% return on investment and $2.1 million in productivity savings. That’s why we’re committed to identifying more “receipt photo moments” during this historic time of rapid digital transformation.