How to Use Slack to Create a Positive Work Culture

Every business can benefit from creating a positive work environment where your team feels encouraged, engaged, and recognized for their hard work. Slack is a platform designed for communication and collaboration and can be a wonderful tool that can benefit your workforce in many ways.

Slack offers much more than your traditional emails or chat rooms. Your team can talk directly to other team members, or you can create channels where groups of specific people can chat and share ideas. The platform allows you to upload files, use emojis and GIFs, pin important posts, and more. However, the benefits of Slack go far beyond just communication. Your business can harness Slack to boost employee engagement, create a sense of community in your workforce, and even give employee recognition.

How do you increase engagement on Slack
Did you know that according to the Corporate Leadership Council, employees with lower engagement are four times more likely to leave their jobs than employees that are highly engaged? Slack can help you tackle this issue, and even track engagement.

Slack has built-in reporting that you can access at any time. This is a great tool to tell how engaged your employees are and if you need to make improvements.

Here are some examples of data that is trackable on Slack:

• How many messages have been sent and from where (channels or direct)
• Number of users online
• How many files people are uploading

Use Slack as your go-to platform for information sharing and make the most of the tools they offer. Collaborating is easy with the ability to share files and by using “pinned” posts.

Make sure you are utilizing the “star” function. This is meant to prioritize discussions, so this will keep the important stuff at the top of the list, encouraging conversations and participation.

How do you create community on Slack
Channels are a great way to create a community while using Slack. Create fun channels to encourage participation, to share ideas, and to get creative.

Creating a sense of community builds a stronger team, promotes teamwork, and fosters a happy work environment.

Use these channel ideas to help foster a sense of community within your team:

• Create a channel for all of your staff. Make the topic something broad to encourage conversation and participation.
• Have a channel for each of your departments, so there is one place they can all easily discuss important subjects and share ideas.
• Take your projects to Slack through channels. Add the members of a project team so they can utilize Slack as their main form of communication and collaboration. 
• It doesn’t have to be all business. You can create channels that are just for sharing ideas and are related to fun topics!
• Make recognition a part of your culture. Create channels that are just for celebrating achievements, announcing birthdays, and recognizing work anniversaries. 

How do you give praise & recognition on Slack
Employee recognition can be a critical part of building great company culture. A survey by Sirota Consulting revealed that only 51% of workers were satisfied with recognition they received after a job well done. Rather than relying on management and leadership to be responsible for recognition, you can rely on your entire team to help.

Make the most of Slack by encouraging peer recognition for a job well done. Since you have the ability to tag people within channels, you can have your employees involved in pointing out when someone goes above-and-beyond.

There are lots of options for implementing a recognition system:

• Create a channel where employees can tag co-workers they feel deserve to be recognized.
• Use these recognitions to determine employee of the week/month/quarter/year.
• Set up point systems, with prizes for reaching certain scores.
• Create a task force of employees that are responsible for encouraging peer recognition.

Decide on the parameters and put them in a pinned post under your recognition channel. Assign moderators and put someone in charge of tracking achievements. Think of new and exciting prizes to keep employees engaged and participating. Giving visibility to positive contributions not only encourages hard work, but it keeps your team happy!

Integrating apps into Slack
Slack offers the unique feature of integrating apps. To make the most of Slack, use Assembly to empower your work team!

Assembly is a recognition and engagement platform that helps scale your company culture. Through features such as easy-to-track recognition, culture rewards, and badges, creating a positive work culture has never been easier! Assembly focuses on peer recognition, and even has built-in rewards such as gift cards. They even have built-in birthday bots so you never miss an important day for your staff!

See how Assembly can help scale your company culture; we are free to use for unlimited users!

About the Author: Christina Seidel
Christina Seidel was a marketing major who has been working in both the sales and HR field. She is a seasoned content and copywriter who has several published articles Christina is a sports-fanatic and animal lover, and when she is not working she can be found on the softball field. You can reach Christina at lifelettersbychristina@gmail.com or find her on LinkedIn.