Slack is a great tool for communicating with your colleagues and clients, but there’s much more to it than just being a communication tool. You can turn Slack into more than just a tool by utilizing Slack’s included features, adding apps, and using custom apps. After Covid, a vast majority of companies decided to continue their employees' work from home, which ultimately impacted daily employee communication. The idea of in-person communication has been completely re-conceptualized by working from home and this is where you can let Slack power your workflows and become your new re-envisioned virtual office.
Slack can connect you to your office at home, or rather, it can become your new reimagined office. In this blog, we’re going to explain exactly what that means and how you can take advantage of everything Slack has to offer.
Slack’s In-House Features
While Slack seems simple at first glance, there’s actually a lot more to it than what meets the eye. Many people use it solely for its communication features, but it goes a lot deeper than that on the base level. Being able to make the most of your experience with Slack is how you can turn it from being your communication tool to being your new office.
Instantly connect with someone
Very office-like communication
Allows for real-time conversations and collaboration
Set triggers to automatically activate workflows
Fully customizable
Ability to import workflows
Create efficient, effective workflows that are catered to you and your team
Extremely easy to setup
Useful for creating reminders for yourself or your team
Can be set to activate on a certain day at a certain time
Integrations
Slack allows you to implement various integrations directly into its platform and some of the biggest apps you can integrate into it are Google Apps, Salesforce, and Confluence. The usage of these integrations really helps drive the fact that Slack can be your office away from the office, mainly because it helps it become your aggregate for all of your communication and ramp up collaborative efforts.
Allows you to get notifications regarding your org, objects, and records
Grants you the ability to add new objects to your org
Configure both objects and records from Slack
Google Apps
Create meetings
Message your meeting attendees
Get Calendar notifications
Get any notifications regarding documents, comments, and newly added documents
Make comments from Slack on any document
Suggest/make changes to documents
Important emails directly into channels
Both a Slack App and a Google extension
Notifications
Shows recently viewed pages
Respond directly to comments through Slack.
Custom Apps
Customs apps add a much deeper level of depth to your Slack experience and are a way to efficiently make use of the Slack and Salesforce APIs. Custom apps can be set up to monitor various tasks and triggers in Slack such as watching for a certain emote reaction, message, or slash command; however, based on what action is used will determine which custom app will go into motion.
The process:
Example: Setting PTO Time
As you can see, custom apps can be set up to cover a wide range of processes and automate various tasks, such as scheduling PTO time. All it does is require your activation of the app and your inputs, and then the app and APIs handle the rest of the process for you. By using these, it almost feels like you’re trying to handle your PTO time within your office rather than doing it through a website.
Conclusion
Slack on its own is a fantastic way to communicate with your team and clients, but the addition of various applications, usage of features, and the integration of your workflow into it is what sets it apart from other communication tools. It ultimately can become a cohesive experience that feels like a virtual office. The utilization of the already-in-place features and the addition of integrations allows it to act like an office, especially since it lets you communicate with your team immediately, almost as if you’re just walking around the office talking to your team members physically. Let Slack power your workflow and become your new assistant rather than using it as just a communication tool.
