Reinvent work and unlock faster collaboration in IT

When you think about the biggest issues you’re tackling as an IT leader at your company these days, “belonging” might not immediately come to mind.

But in reality, a diminished sense of belonging during the pandemic was the top concern expressed by workers in a recent survey we commissioned. And when workers feel less connected at work, their companies suffer too, due to a decrease in productivity and an increase in attrition. Fortunately, IT teams can play a critical role in identifying tools and systems to help improve the situation.

In our new, free e-book Reinventing work in IT, we pinpoint new challenges like these facing workplaces today, and we explore the role of IT in helping companies succeed in these fast-changing times:

• Click here to read this ebook in French
• Click here to read this ebook in German

In writing this e-book, we talked to business and IT leaders across industries and countries about their challenges, strategies and predictions for what comes next. From their input, we identified:

• Five distinct themes that have emerged since the pandemic started, including two new sources of competitive advantage for companies, and the role automation is playing in accelerating productivity
• The two biggest challenges posed by hybrid working, and how to choose the right technology solutions to address them
• The emerging concept of the “digital HQ,” and why so many businesses plan to invest in it within the next year

The benefits of remote work

The guide also includes some unexpected takeaways from our first-ever quarterly Remote Employee Experience Index. With this survey of over 9,000 knowledge workers, we learned how remote work has positively affected people’s perceptions of their:

• Work-life balance
• Work-related stress and anxiety
• Productivity

By better facilitating remote work, IT teams can help alleviate these and other quality-of-life concerns for their workforces. They can also have a positive impact on their company’s bottom line; as you’ll learn in our e-book, businesses with highly engaged employees report:

• 4.2x average profit
• 2.8x revenue per employee
• 40% lower employee turnover

Helpful tips for IT teams

It’s typically the responsibility of IT to equip people with the products and processes they need to collaborate in new ways, and our e-book is full of ideas for doing just that. We share details of how channel-based messaging platforms like Slack can break down institutional barriers and bridge departments that might otherwise be siloed, making employees feel more connected and aligned.

We also discuss how Slack integrates with applications that many workers use every day, like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, Jira and hundreds more. Learn how you can connect Slack with these popular services, create automated workflows and build bots to further reduce inefficiencies and give your coworkers a single streamlined digital headquarters.

Finally, don’t just take our word for it. Our new e-book is packed with examples of IT teams at organizations that have experienced the benefits of Slack firsthand.

For example, you’ll discover how TD Ameritrade kept people connected and boosted morale by creating timely new channels within Slack.

“We needed a solution that facilitated communication and information sharing and would integrate with our other software systems,” says Vijay Sankaran, former CIO of TD Ameritrade. “Slack provided that at an enterprise scale.”

You’ll find out how Canadian grocery leader Loblaw streamlined workflows by creating a custom Slack app called Jeanie to answer common internal questions.

“The Jeanie app accelerates the time it takes for colleagues in the field to perform daily tasks,” explains Brandon Sam Soon, a software developer at Loblaw Digital. “What used to take an hour or two now takes seconds and happens right within Slack.”

And you’ll learn how Twitter utilized Slack for its first-ever virtual all-hands meeting during the pandemic’s early days.

“I don’t think we’ll ever go back to working the way we did before,” says Jennifer Christie, Twitter’s VP of People.

All that, plus an introduction to Slack Connect (a secure way to enable communication with external partners within Slack), a deep dive into Slack’s security and compliance controls, and more ways to unlock the full potential of your people and tools with Slack.