How To Use Slack to Increase Collaborate With Your Team

Slack is without doubt one of the most popular tools for workplace collaboration today. Launched less than five years ago, the online communication platform already enjoys a daily active user base of more than 5 million people. With over 1.5 million paid accounts, Slack is easily one of the top collaboration tools to watch out for in the coming months. From a business owners’ perspective, Slack offers a terrific opportunity for teams to improve workplace collaboration and communication efficiency. In this article, we will take a look at a few pointers that should help your team achieve this.

Bots

Bots are simple (or sometimes complex) scripts written to make Slack engagement easier and more efficient. Traditional collaboration and communication services like Skype or email do not always allow customizations specific to the needs of your business. With Slack, you may quickly integrate Slack with third party tools or build bots that can parse your conversations to instantly perform specific tasks. A bot like Polly, for example, can let Slack users quickly conduct polls among team members and also view the results without having to use a third party tool for polling.

Linking to conversations

Although Slack provides a way for businesses to create separate channels for the various categories of conversations, you may still get overwhelmed with the number of messages that are posted within any given channel. If you have a team that works across multiple time zones, then you may frequently encounter issues where one team member may want to reference a conversation that was made several hours earlier. An easy way to do this is by linking to your previous conversations. Simply click on the options menu to the right of the conversations to find a unique link to reference to in your conversation.

Customizing your Slack team window

Culture plays an important role in any organization. Slack provides businesses with an easy way to personalize the virtual collaboration space. The Customize page allows users to add their own emojis and loading messages to the team pages. While this is mostly used for fun and to make the board more vibrant, business users also make use of the emoji options to add frequently used icons unique to their business, or to add important notifications and pan-team reminders through the loading message option.

Integrations

A big advantage of Slack as a collaboration tool is how easily you can integrate it with other business tools you may be using already. You could pull files from Google Drive or Dropbox with just a click of a button, or extract Twitter streams related to your business and feed it directly into a Slack channel. You may also use other collaboration tools like Hangout from within Slack. This is especially useful when you want to engage with a third party vendor who does not use Slack yet. All of this is possible through third party integrations available on Slack.

Telecommuting is becoming an inevitable part of the modern working world, particularly because technology allows for an increasingly distributed workforce. Online collaboration tools like Slack are vital in ensuring synchronization of communication among the members in your team. Do you have a Slack tip to increase collaboration efficiency? Share it with us in the comments.