4 Tips for Using Slack for Small Business

The more I use Slack, the more I’m learning the value of simple hacks that help me fine-tune the app to work best for me. Slack is the center of productivity for your business. It connects everyone you work with — both those in your business and your key partners and customers —  and supports the way people naturally work together — in real-time or not, in-person and remote, structured or informal.

But as a product marketer with a large distributed team, it’s not just increased productivity that I’m after with Slack. There are some great hacks that help promote wellbeing through Slack — my own, and that of my team and colleagues. They can help your growing small business promote overall mental and physical wellness while saving time, too. And, as the research shows, employee wellbeing is good for productivity. 

Slack helps you to bring together the right people in one place around a shared goal, project, or initiative to create visibility and alignment across any topic. With access to all of this information, it’s actually helpful to have some strategies for focusing on what’s most important to you. I’m going to outline four easy Slack hacks that save time and foster employee happiness. How? They filter out what you don’t need, so you can focus on what does matter. 

1. Use Slack channels to stay organized and save time

One of Slack’s most powerful features is, perhaps, its simplest: Everything you post to Slack is always right there. With channels, you can bring the right people and information together to share ideas, make decisions, and keep teams aligned as you move work forward.

Channels are a great way to stay organized. Just set up a channel for your team (such as #sales-team or #finance-team), invite all of your team members to join, and post important announcements, files, and updates to the channel. Using team channels to communicate announcements, status updates, event/deadline reminders, and the like really helps move work forward faster and create alignment with fewer meetings. 

Instead of a weekly status meeting you can create an automatic workflow that asks team members to share a quick status update at a certain time every week. It’s super easy to get started: Here’s a quick guide that can help.

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Also, with the new Slack Clips feature, you can record and post audio, video, and screen recordings to communicate easily with your team, regardless of their time zone or location. You can use clips to share ideas and updates, or just to say hello. 

2. Replace unnecessary meetings with Huddles

Huddles are another way to help stop the meeting madness. Hardly anything is as stressful as a full calendar of meetings but with Slack, you can reduce the number of meetings your team has, while maintaining the ability to sync in real time. With one click, you can open an audio connection in your channel, and whoever’s available can hop in for a quick discussion. With lightweight video, multi-person screen-share capabilities and fun effects, teams can work alongside one another in huddles the same way they would in the office. Plus, conversations are saved in dedicated, searchable threads so anyone who joins can quickly get up to speed.

3. Schedule messages

Scheduling messages to post at a future date and time is a great way to promote peace of mind. Know that your announcement, meeting agenda, or other important message will be delivered to the team right on time, even if you’ll be handling something else or away from the screen at the time. 

Best of all, it’s super easy to do! 

1. Compose your message like you always do. 
2. Instead of clicking “Send,” click the downward arrow just to the right of the Send button.
3. Choose one of the suggested times, or schedule your message to post at a custom time of your choosing.

That’s it! At the specified time and date, your message will post.

4. Remind your team to take regular breaks

When it comes to cultivating good habits, we all could use a friendly nudge from time to time. Drinking water, stretching, or taking a short walk on a regular basis goes a long way towards wellbeing.

Here’s an easy-to-set-up Slack workflow to post a message to a team channel every day at a given time, with a reminder to take a break. Mentioning a team’s user group will notify everyone:

1. Download the example.
2. Navigate to Workflow Builder and select “Import,” then import the file you just downloaded.
3. Once imported, edit the workflow to suit your team. You can create a custom message, and adjust the publish time and frequency.
4. Publish and let everyone know you’re looking out for their wellbeing!

At the specified time and date, your message will auto-publish, like this:

Slack is your company’s productivity center. It connects everyone in your business and supports the way you naturally work together. Hacks like these are just the beginning of how you can promote wellbeing — and get more done — using Slack.