8 Tips to Keep Your Team’s Slack Active and Engaged

With the rise of remote work, team members are no longer limited to corporate offices and even extend worldwide. Communication methods have shifted from drawn-out board room meetings to conferences over Zoom and virtual meetings.

Slack is a popular asynchronous communication tool adopted by companies to boost employee engagement and streamline productivity. But Slack is not a silver-bullet solution: like any tool, you have to use it well to maximize the benefits. If you’re looking for ways to improve your team’s use of Slack, then you’ve come to the right place.

Stay with us as we explore the rise of global work, how Slack plays a critical role in company culture, and how to make the most of it.

1. Encourage employees to customize notifications to reduce distractions

We live in an era of information overload, and our cognitive abilities are overburdened. A study reveals that 98% of the population struggles to focus on more than one thing at a time, which doesn’t bode well for a digital world. A flurry of notifications can cause more harm than good, disrupting productivity instead of streamlining workflow.

Encouraging your team to customize their Slack notifications will help reduce distractions (especially outside of working hours to promote work-life balance). You can follow and share the following instructions for Slack on desktop:

Click your profile image and select preferences
Choose Notifications on the left
Underneath Notify me about… choose to be notified for all new messages, only direct messages, mentions, specific keywords or nothing at all
Check the box for Use different settings for my mobile devices if preferred (and select your triggers of choice)
Check the box for Notify me about replies to threads I’m following if desired
Set trigger keywords to your workspace by adding them to My Keywords, using commas to separate each keyword
Choose when to receive a notification by setting a day and time in the Notification Schedule area
Pick a sound from the Notification sound area (or mute if preferred)
Check or uncheck the toggle to include a preview of the message (which helps to scan if the message is important)
Select timing to be notified using the drop down for When I’m not active on desktop
Check (or uncheck) the box to get email notifications for mentions and direct messages

If some Slack channels are more chatty than others, then you can also set channel-specific notifications.

The mobile settings may be slightly different, so double check your notifications on your mobile app.

2. Share Slack etiquette guidelines with remote employees during onboarding

New hire onboarding plays a vital role in welcoming remote team members. Many companies share a welcome pack that includes the employee’s Slack login details and information on the various channels. It’s also helpful to share slack etiquette guidelines during onboarding and store them in an accessible place for future reference.

Consider the company culture when outlining Slack etiquette guidelines. While each team will have nuanced differences, most teams can adopt a few global guidelines:

Communicate effectively by sending your entire message in one go
Condense your message and make it skim-friendly by including bullet points, bold, italics, and emojis to emphasize certain points and set the tone
Use threads for effective team collaboration
Make use of emoji reactions instead of sending unnecessary follow-up messages
Take advantage of the Do Not Disturb feature to reduce off-hour notifications (which is especially handy for team members across different time zones)
Establish response expectations on a channel level
Use public channels instead of DMs for more effective teamwide communication
Ask someone if they want to join a new Slack channel before adding them without permission
Add channel descriptions to keep information siloed as needed
Encourage a channel for social banter where you can discuss birthdays, have icebreaker conversations, and share gifs
Review and edit messages before sending them
Sync calendar with Slack
Establish zero-tolerance for hate speech or discriminatory language

3. Create Slack channels for non-work hobbies and team building

Research conducted by Future Workplace revealed that 70% of employees say that friends at work are key to a happy working life, leading to improved collaboration and productivity.

Dedicating a Slack channel to non-work hobbies and team-building activities encourages connection outside of work conversation, from informal discussions to organizing happy hour meetups.

While some employees follow one another on social media, others rely on making connections during working hours. Social Slack channels encourage inclusivity, boost team engagement, and serve as a virtual water cooler.

For example, if your team has several biking enthusiasts, create a #mountatinbiking channel to share routes or invite people on weekend rides. A #trivia channel is great for sharing fun facts and geeking out.

Other suggestions include a #random channel for casual work banter, #life-events to share milestone moments, and #world-window, which connects employees around the world.

4. Centralize important information on Slack channels

Take a moment to consider how many online platforms you use to communicate on in any given workday. It can be difficult to find information from an old conversation or follow up on a request once they become buried in old text, email, video chat tools like Zoom, and project management tools like Trello.

Slack’s channels allow you to group topics of conversation on an easy-to-use platform so teams can reference important information quickly. Managers can create and group Slack channels as centralized spaces for important information such as meeting agendas, project progress, and standard operating procedures.

The option to pin a message on Slack makes it even easier to reference particularly important messages such as company rules or the announcement of a team member of the month. You can also link important work-related documents in a channel’s description for easy clicking.

5. Use Roots plug-ins to transform Slack into an easy HR tool

Roots helps distributed companies build company culture, increase team collaboration, and reduce burnout through HR Slack apps, or plug-ins.

Use Connections to get remote teams to meet one another

Remote workers are at a higher risk of feeling isolated, with 7 in 10 remote workers feeling the impact of social isolation. Without daily face-to-face encounters, remote teams rely on video conferencing tools such as Zoom. Roots Connections offers another way to build lasting relationships with teammates with similar interests and personalities.

Roots Connections groups team members with similar interests based on a survey, automatically creating groups and Slack channels based on the results. The plug-in also has a bot that sends watercooler topics to spark a conversation and sets up meetup routlettes to introduce new team members to one another.

Use 1:1 to schedule and keep track of check-Ins

Managers are responsible for leading their team and coaching direct reports. Yet scheduling and making the most of regular check-ins with a remote team can be challenging, especially across time zones.

Root’s 1-on-1 plugin makes it easy to organize your weekly check-in and conduct an effective exchange. The features make it easy to align on talking points, give and receive real-time feedback, and track one-on-one history to identify trends in performance or mood.

Use Org Chart to keep teams aligned

A company’s organizational hierarchy isn’t always clear on a remote team, especially if you have more than a few departments. An org chart is a diagram that makes it easy to visualize organizational structure and the various reporting relationships.

Root’s org chart plugin for Slack provides an effective way to create a visual diagram of the entire team. The visualization automatically updates whenever profiles change, making it easy to keep your team in the loop on important organizational changes.

Sharing this knowledge helps team members effectively stay up to date on all relevant announcements, including new hires, work anniversaries, and more.

6. Use threads to keep conversations organized

Slack threads help create organized discussions on certain topics, keeping all related messages in a single thread.

Team members can follow a topic in detail without adding clutter to a Slack channel or sending a flurry of private messages (often needing to be repeated in public channels).

Here’s how to best make use of threads on Slack.

Reply to a thread: simply hover over the message, click the Reply in thread icon, and type the reply
Manage thread notifications: manage notifications for a single thread by hovering over the thread and clicking the three dots icon
Set notifications for all threads in a channel: Select More notification options in the notifications menu below the channel name
View all threads: select Threads from the left sidebar to view all conversations you’re following

7. Create a shoutouts channel to recognize employees

Employee recognition is key to productivity. Entrepreneur reveals that 82% of employees admit recognition in their work environment is essential to their well-being. And 40% of employed Americans confess that they would give more effort to their work if managers and team members recognized them more often.

Slack is an effective way to improve employee recognition by creating shoutouts for a job well done. Keep these tips in mind when initiating a shoutout culture.

Identify the goals, values, skills, and behavior that you want to recognize
Decide which channel to use for shoutouts
Encourage team members to acknowledge one another for work well-done
Use shoutouts as a qualitative metric to track employee performance

8. Use integrations to reduce app switching

Slack’s ability to integrate various applications helps to streamline productivity and combine daily tasks in a centralized place.

With the option to integrate collaboration tools such as Google Drive and OneDrive, your team can join video calls, manage calendars, and collaborate on various files without switching from one app to another.

Slack integrations offer various tools in a central place, with particular apps helping departments improve their workflow and improve task retention. These integrated tools boost team collaboration and team engagement, contributing to a robust virtual team.

Roots Plugin for a new (better) way of working

As a seamless HR Slack plugin for distributed teams, Roots helps keep your Slack community active and engaged without compromising productivity.

Roots is easy to deploy, cost-effective, and loved by users. Want to learn how the tool helps manage PTO, onboarding, connections, candidate referrals, and more? Get started today.

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