How to use Slack to grow culture within a distributed team
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How to use Slack to grow culture? let’s break it down… (video at bottom)
This probably won’t come as a surprise to you but at Signable, we’re big on technology. Working across two offices and with members of the team regularly working remotely, it is crucial that we’re able to communicate with each other when we’re not sitting next to each other!
Emailing each other every ten minutes just doesn’t quite cut it for us. We’re a fast growing team working in numerous locations so, we needed somewhere fast to talk altogether. Introducing Slack.
How to use Slack to grow culture – How we use it…
“Slack unifies your entire team’s communications, making your workflow, well, flow a lot better. All the apps you need are seamlessly integrated into our platform, and you can easily search and find all your files, calls, messages and colleagues in one place.” Not very catchy but it explains it pretty well.
For us, Slack does all that and so much more. It helps us get to know each other while not always being able to spend time face to face. Learning how to use Slack to grow culture in the office allows for trust, transparency and inclusion. We use Slack to talk about everything Signable and anything outside that. The next time you see Theresa May awkwardly dancing in public, we’ve probably already shared it on Slack.
It’s such an important part of managing a distributed team to allow for clear and concise communication while also creating an enjoyable work environment.
How to use Slack to grow culture – Our channels
If you have used Slack or any other similar work based messaging service in the past, this won’t come as a surprise but different areas of work are split up into different channels. We have different channels for the product, customer and marketing teams and there is a channel which we receive company updates and share anything cool that we find across the internet. It’s called Watercooler. A bit like a water cooler in an old school office where you would go to have a drink so you could have a good gossip about everyone in the office, clever name right? Except we don’t do gossip, we do gifs.
Watercooler is where we say hello to each other in the morning and goodbye in the evenings, it’s where we’re all together, regardless of location. So when we hear the familiar “ssss pa pa” we know someone wants to talk. So yeah, weirdly, the sound has a fond place in the hearts of Signabees everywhere.
What’s next? What else – we had to try and show our love in a truly Signable way….