One of the best communications tools in the world is Slack. I’m not breaking any news by stating this. For those of you in the technology sector I don’t have to explain to you the effectiveness of a tool like Slack, or Microsoft Teams. Those are the two best in the industry currently, in my opinion. Even in its earliest moments Microsoft Teams immediately entered the space and became the second-best option out there.
Before I go into what I learned rolling out Slack to the company I work at, I want to dive into what determined our decision to use Slack as opposed to Teams. The obvious choice for our company should have been Microsoft Teams, if the tool had been up to par. We’re a complete Microsoft shop in terms of our other tools we use in IT. We’re heavily invested in Azure, Office 365, and the rest of the Microsoft suite. It would have made sense for us to simply slap Teams on our stack.
The main reason we chose Slack over Teams was the time frame when we made the decision, in early 2017, Teams was still technically in preview mode and not fully baked. We tried to use Teams when the preview first hit and there were a plethora of bugs, such as no mobile notifications, that made it tough for us to want to roll it out to our organization.
So, we chose Slack, it was perfectly ready to roll out after a few years of trial and error as a company. The cost-benefit analysis proved to be the nail in the office, the benefits with Slack were so much better than Teams could provide us at the time. Looking at how our company has adopted and run with Slack, the decision proved to be the right one.
We launched Slack in our company through a slow, concise, and planned roll out. The slow growth with quick jump in mid-May due to the release to a larger group of people at once.
As of today we’ve rolled out Slack to about half our company due to location, and we’ll roll out Slack to the rest of the company later this year.
How we rolled Slack out was due to some of the technology behavior of the employees of our company:
- Our company loves email, a ton. Whether it’s for file storage, quick one line emails, those emails where the entire content of the email is in the subject line, and just about every other way email could be used.
- Our company has segments of teams that text for quick communication and work conversations.
- Multiple chat/collaboration services have been half rolled out from other teams and none of them have stuck company-wide.
Understanding these prerequisites, we decided to do a slow, methodical roll out understanding that we would eventually push it out to everyone with support from leadership. That was the ultimate comfort that enabled us to do the slow roll out as opposed to an all at once free for all.
Looking back the way we did it worked well for our company. Being able to enable each team or department to apply Slack to their team at first was a good move for our company. At the same time the roll out would have eventually failed had our company not started putting information that employees needed to see ONLY on Slack. Not sending out as many staff emails, and instead posting that same information in Slack. Doing so made sure that people were not only signing up for Slack, but monitoring it, and using it.
The way that we trained employees was also an interesting experiment in our Slack roll out. We did three different things in enabling our employees to use Slack successfully.
- We built a website that had training materials specific to our company, as well as general Slack information from their website.
- We did two Slack training sessions (see photo) that was an hour-ish overview of Slack and how-to that then sent them to the website for more information or questions to our Slack help channel.
- We did smaller training sessions with teams when doing the slow roll out to the individual department and teams.
Being able to enable business partners to feel like the application is something they want was the coolest thing about this. It’s what enabled the roll out of the application go so smoothly and successfully. The roll out certainly wasn’t perfect, but it’s helped us to achieve a high level of success and satisfaction from the business partners. We’ve been able to help people be more efficient with our technology stack by adding Slack, that’s what matters. That’s what makes working in technology worth it.
