Thrive Global’s new Slack integration: productivity without burnout

Slack is where work and productivity happen. Arianna Huffington, the founder and CEO of Thrive Global, also sees Slack as the logical home of well-being moments that help keep us engaged and happy with our work, so we can keep burnout at bay. As Huffington shared at Dreamforce, Thrive and Slack are a natural team for the new launch of well-being tools that are embedded directly into Slack.

“Thrive Global and Slack aren’t just partners—we’re customers of each other’s platforms,” Huffington says. “Our team knows what makes Slack special and has tapped into the unique features of the Slack platform to create this integration.”

Thrive and Slack have much in common, according to Huffington, including a passion for supporting productivity and well-being. These are intertwined goals but also misunderstood, she says: the conventional wisdom is that burnout is the price we have to pay for success.

“That delusion is giving way to a model where in order to be our most productive, we must prioritize well-being,” Huffington says. “And it’s not just our physical well-being, but our mental and emotional well-being.”

Connecting work and well-being in Slack

The work of building and maintaining the Thrive Global platform is done in Slack, which is why Thrive employees know inside and out how to create well-being tools that complement Slack workflows. In fact, the Thrive team found Slack indispensable for creating the new Slack app. 

Thrive Global employees have Slack channels, such as #customer-success, for every partnership and integration. Those channels are where Thrivers collaborate, exchange ideas, share feedback, and keep everyone on the same page in terms of progress and deadlines. 

In between and around productive work, Thrive employees also have social Slack channels where the well-being activities happen organically—like the popular #life-of-thrivers, where team members share everything from cute baby photos to weekend and vacation highlights. The social channels have become the company’s “virtual watercoolers,” strengthening company culture and creating moments of connection among Thrivers.

“This is why platforms like Slack that bring more delight, more joy, more collaboration and deeper relationships to our workdays are actually productivity multipliers,” says Huffington. By placing the tools in Slack workflows, well-being isn’t an afterthought but an integral part of how people work and collaborate.

Balancing productivity with moments of rest and renewal

The Thrive partnership with Slack centers on key innovations:

Integration with Sales Elevate. Sales reps with many tasks to manage use Sales Elevate, which is integrated with Salesforce Sales Cloud, to automate processes and gain back time to focus on deals and customers. The Thrive integration with Sales Elevate will take automation a step further—bringing well-being interventions to Slack workflows, supporting sellers as they work to meet ambitious quotas. 

True to Thrive’s mission, the Sales Elevate integration will make critical connections between productivity and well-being. When sales reps most need the interventions, like at the end of the quarter, Thrive will step in with suggestions for personalized 60-Second Resets (videos that reduce stress and encourage energizing breaks) and AI-powered Microsteps (science-backed suggestions for small actions, like going to sleep earlier).

Well-Being Template. The canvas Well-Being Template will help Slack users create automated well-being journeys aligned to key moments in the employee lifecycle, such as onboarding, switching managers or returning from leave. The template includes Entry Interviews and Re-entry Interviews that will help employees and their managers communicate clearly, clarify responsibilities and reach goals, all directly in Slack.

Sustainable behavior change starts small

While the Thrive tools embedded in Slack are personalized for the employee, the work they’re doing, and the moment they’re in, they have qualities in common:

• The nudges or reminders are small and don’t take much time—Huffington and her team based them on science that shows behavior change should start small to be sustainable.
• Thrive tools rely on productivity multipliers like Slack because they bring more delight, collaboration and deeper relationships to workdays.

The philosophy for the Thrive tools in Slack is the same as Thrive’s overarching goal: to be our most productive, and to sustain our productivity over the long term, we must prioritize well-being. “Thrive for Slack adds not just moments of well-being,” Huffington says, “but even more delight and human connection to Slack—because we know that’s when employees are their most productive.”

The Thrive for Slack app is coming soon—learn more today.