News

Making friends at a new workplace can be daunting, but not for new employees at Up, Australia’s first mobile-only digital bank. Its custom Slack integration, called Barista, randomly matches colleagues for a digital coffee date, setting up a time and topic of conversation.  “This makes it easy to get to know each other and have conversations not just about work but other things that matter to us as people, too,” says Up co-founder Dominic Pym.  It is not just about coffee. Up has a passionate video game culture among its team members, so one of its engineers developed a live Mario Kart leaderboard on Slack to track each race. Mr Pym says he sets aside 15 minutes daily to join in the fun.  “The app integration means an algorithm automatically posts to a Slack channel how we’re tracking based on our entire playing history as a team. That’s nearly 10 years’ worth of Mario Kart history. I’m not very good, but I love the interaction with staff.” These are just some of the ways the company is using Slack to boost employee engagement and team camaraderie. New communications platforms that connect employees across time and place will be increasingly important, as .  As an , Slack has become increasingly valuable for businesses – not just for getting work done but also for sparking connections and maintaining a company culture of inclusivity, positivity and acceptance. Creating an inclusive workplace starts with getting everyone on the same page, whether they are new hires or a distributed team working across different continents and time zones.  Such is the case for Culture Amp, the Australian-based employee experience platform, with almost 1,000 employees across the globe. “Our go-to-market teams at Culture Amp rely on Slack as the communication backbone,” says Mr Justin Vandehey, Culture Amp’s director of partner integrations and development. Through channels, huddles and audio or video clips, its global cross-functional teams in different timezones “can make contributions asynchronously to support customers better and drive revenue forward”, Mr Vandehey adds. While employees can use private chats, Slack channels help encourage them to share openly, fostering a sense of transparency. This allows them to feel more comfortable voicing concerns, without fear of being ostracised or ridiculed. Accessing collective information is also important for companies to operate on a united front. feature, Slack AI, makes this more achievable. Features like AI-powered search and summaries of work channels offer a Mr Andy Kung, vice president of operations at Beyond Better Foods, a New York-based food start-up, notes: “The enhanced search capabilities of Slack AI have been really helpful to fast-track answers, especially when it comes to logistics.”  The simplicity of the tool means that even new employees can quickly understand past conversations and get up to speed on shared team knowledge, helping them feel more confident from day one. Non-work channels in Slack are also a great way for employees to find common ground with others throughout the company, building relationships and creating camaraderie. When new hires start at Culture Amp, they are encouraged to join city-specific or special-interest “club” channels that appeal to them, and to use Slack to celebrate their colleagues' work and wins. The “#all_camper_yays” channel celebrates companywide achievements, while custom Slack emojis representing Culture Amp’s core values are used to openly give recognition to individuals and teams.   “Onboarding is one of the most crucial steps in a new employee’s journey, and Slack ensures our new employees feel connected and informed,” adds Mr Vandehey. The best companies draw strength from the diversity of their employees and facilitate conversations about accepting and embracing differences.  like Inclusive Bot and AllyBot help achieve this. Using AI, they detect disrespectful or non-inclusive language in the workplace across gender, disability, age, religion, appearance, class and many other categories, and suggest alternatives.  For example, when someone sends a Slack message addressing team members as “guys”, these bots send a private message to gently remind the user that the term may exclude women on the team, and offer more gender-neutral options like “people” or “everyone”.  By promoting such inclusive practices in the workplace, employees are encouraged to communicate with intention and sensitivity. According to the , 80 per cent of global employees feel invisible at work. However, when they feel seen and valued by their organisation, they are over five times more likely to develop a strong sense of belonging in the workplace, making them more willing to contribute to organisational success. During the Covid-19 lockdowns, Culture Amp’s founder and chief executive officer Didier Elzinga began a “#ceo” Slack channel to provide regular updates directly to employees and answer questions submitted through the company’s “ask me anything” surveys.  This helps build a direct line of familiarity and trust between company leadership and employees, which was needed more than ever during the pandemic.  Mr Elzinga adds: “I got so much feedback from people that hearing me say, ‘Today, just do what you can; that is enough’ was actually incredibly important and powerful.” Underpinning an inclusive workplace culture is the concept of empathy – being aware of people’s time, communication style, bandwidth and need for work-life balance. Slack has designed many features to allow employees to set boundaries between work and life, so they don’t feel burnt out by being “always-on”. For instance, custom statuses inform teams when employees are unavailable. Do-not-disturb (DND) settings allow employees to temporarily snooze notifications during working hours to concentrate on specific tasks, or to indicate that they have ended work for the day. Colleagues will be able to see when someone is in DND mode and know not to expect a response immediately. And in a bid to reduce lengthy meetings, Workflow Builder helps all workers  . Slack also makes it easy to create asynchronous work updates, where workers do not necessarily work at the same time but are nonetheless synchronised in their efforts for a common work goal.  At ShopBack, a shopping, rewards and payment platform, employees use Slack's scheduled messaging function to help globally distributed teams collaborate easily.  Its chief technology officer, Mr San Wai Oo, shares: “Because I can schedule messages, it’s easy to align tasks and communications with other team members who may be working asynchronously where their personal schedule or time zones don’t naturally align.  “Once I’ve scheduled my messages, I can continue working on other important tasks, knowing they’re set to go out at the appropriate time.” .