How Companies Use Slack to Boost Productivity

Do you Slack? You should. The popularity of Slack, an online instant messaging and all-around collaboration tool, continues to grow.

More companies recognize the benefits of collaboration platforms like Slack as the new communication medium to co-create and problem-solve among their employees. It’s a complete, integrative communication tool that keeps internal communications synchronized, interactive and organized. It is great for promoting business productivity, team building, and overall company cohesiveness.

Slack combines the benefits of Skype, email, text messaging and file sharing-avoiding the endless searching through data scattered everywhere. It promises to replace email as a versatile, comprehensive medium for all company communication needs.

What is Slack?

Slack’s basic properties organize lots of moving parts. For example, imagine a television with channels with different programming, one for movies, one for sports, one for comedy, etc. Slack works in channels too, with a directory that organizes discussions, notifications and messages according to topic, purpose or department. 

When your company uses Slack, all employees can discuss general company business and trends, but each department has its own channel, and within that department, teams working on specific projects have their own channel. And everyone can see everything, unless you make the channels private.

How companies use Slack to boost productivity

Sharing options publicly and privately allows for transparency without sacrificing privacy. You can also customize your notifications and preferences to prioritize what’s important to you while still belonging to the company-wide network to see all that’s going on. The customizable option is a major plus for big and small companies as Slack comes with ready-made features or build-your-own, if you need to integrate with a much wider array of apps and software.

For example, you can integrate MailChimp to receive notifications when customers subscribe or leave lists. Or you can track employee hours or company mentions in the news. But the biggest Slack perk is managing teams. It’s able to integrate a host of tools like Trello, Dropbox, Github, and many more: invaluable for technologically advanced service companies supplying access to multiple digital and AI tools.

What’s best of all is the search feature that both locates and filters searches. That way, you don’t have to go digging through mile deep threads of conversations that happened last week to find that one link someone sent you. You simply locate the person you were connecting with and type in a keyword to locate the content.

Finally, drag and drop file sharing documents or pictures is easy, especially since you can integrate dropbox, but you can share just about anything from small bits of code to entire ebooks. And it works well on mobile apps iOS, Android and Windows too.

While Slack use over multiple companies can be overwhelming to some (like too many conversations going at once), it is especially useful for intra company communications. Since it creates a more synchronous environment than email, Slack simulates real time, immediate conversational exchanges great for accessing quick answers, updates and archives.

Slack and Health & Wellness Engagement

Health and wellness engagement providers use tools like Slack to integrate a host of applications that connect employers, employees and health care providers to their wellness programs. Health Hero links to devices such as FitBit, Apple Watch/Health, Jawbone, Google Fit, Strava and more to create wellness activities, facilitate group interaction, communicate findings and analyze data, the bones of any fully automated health and wellness program.

Click here to watch how Health Hero integrates with Slack in less than 2 minutes!

And since Slack facilitates global communication that is natural, conversational and immediate, it’s easier than ever for companies to promote their wellness message, spread product news and new developments. It’s a perfect vehicle for wellness programs, alerting employees to upcoming and ongoing fitness challenges, incentives and progress. Team building, motivation and goal milestones during competitions between and within company departments are natural “high-fives” in this environment.

For wellness, Slack’s a great tool for both fun and achievement. It’s social and productive. Employees meet their wellness goals while employers observe, conduct and tweak their programs to meet their employees’ changing needs. It’s easy because it’s all right there: ongoing and archived. Much tougher to do with simply email. Slack is the superior tool for coordinating various components in one place.

Wellness programs include anything from fun runs to weight loss challenges to chronic disease management. Tracking data and exchanging information easily between employees and health care providers are critical. Slack’s Health Hero integration provides users anywhere quick, easy, unified wellness programs accessed in seconds. And in health, seconds matter.

Health Hero provides smart, multi-channel and integrated health engagement experiences that are powerful and simple to deploy to employees in seconds. Contact us today to learn how we can create a customized plan for you!