Enhancing delivery velocity
Macquarie’s Banking & Financial Services (BFS) roll out of Slack to employees in just six months was an incredibly impressive effort, making the company a worthy winner of the Slack Spotlight Award for 2023.
Operating on the two core principles of reliability and velocity, speed and connectivity are crucial to how Macquarie BFS engages internally.
Macquarie BFS made the strategic decision to introduce Slack so it could consolidate collaboration tools, reduce the reliance on email, and streamline communication to enhance employee experience. The objective was to introduce a platform that could help internal communications between employees and teams run faster.
Employee-powered collaboration
For Macquarie BFS, implementing Slack played a big part in improving the employee experience and boosting collaboration.
A key goal was to alleviate the friction associated with using email as the primary communication tool. “Slack enables a more dynamic and real-time way of communicating, creating an environment that enhances connectivity between employees and teams,” says Richard Heeley, CIO and Head of Technology at Macquarie BFS.
The ease of adoption was also a big advantage for the program as we wanted a fast rollout but had different user groups with different experience levels. It meant change management efforts could focus on the people who needed more support.
“Tools like Slack enable a collaborative culture and will help us continue to improve the way we work,” says Michelle Perera, Head of Delivery, Macquarie BFS.
Cultivating a culture of accelerated delivery
“Through Slack, senior leaders and business stakeholders are able to engage in real-time with the broader BFS project teams,” says Perera.
For its technical teams, Macquarie BFS has much of its developer tooling, including incident, problem and change and risk management, in one place, accessible via Slack.
“Our engineers are able to have all of their conversations in one place,” says Heeley.
Today, each project at Macquarie BFS has its own Slack channel, linked with JIRA for seamless integration. “It’s where the magic happens—engineers, designers, business analysts, stakeholders, all collaborating in real-time,” says Perera. From sharing video demos to real-time problem-solving, the dynamic is interactive and immediate.
“What we’re really working towards is continually speeding up how we operate and our delivery methods,” says Perera.
“Our engineers are able to have all of their conversations in one place.”
Integrating and streamlining with Slack
Moving to Slack as the primary communication tool for Macquarie BFS has meant more than just moving conversations from one platform to another. It was about reimagining Macquarie BFS’s ways of working.
For example, Slack Canvas—a digital whiteboard that lets anyone find, manage and share knowledge with ease—has been a particularly popular feature among staff.
“Our teams created thousands of canvases in the first 48 hours after implementing Slack,” says Heeley.
Staff also have leaned into Slack Huddles—a lightweight way to connect over audio or video at any time—for one-on-one meetings, with Zoom also integrated into Slack for larger gatherings and external calls.
Into the future with Slack
Looking ahead, Macquarie BFS will continue to explore new feature releases and UI enhancements to further evolve employee experience and collaboration on Slack.
“We’re exploring functionality that will be able to pull out and summarise key points from channels and put them into a Slack Canvas, which will be particularly valuable for those who receive a lot of notifications and are looking to reduce the noise they experience on the platform,” says Heeley.
“Our roadmap is focused on continuing to enhance the employee experience on the platform, and we’ll look to embed the latest functionality to do that. If you build an incredible employee experience, then an incredible customer experience follows. You have to think about the two collectively to build and maintain a successful business,” says Heeley.
