Improve Your Company Culture with Slack
The ailments of low staff morale and high turnover are solvable but require commitment. Some companies gloss over it with superficial band-aids like pizza parties, happy hours, announcing some extra work-from-home days, etc. Those transparently half-hearted attempts to address burnout and exhaustion of team members have become a popular target on Linkedin and social media, as the absurdity and ubiquity of these lame gestures get recognized.
Addressing these issues requires hard thinking, creative problem solving, and the right tools to support the new desired processes designed to make people happy and teams productive. For many, Slack can be exactly that tool. Here are five common causes for staff burnout and turnover and how Slack enables organizations to improve their policies and culture.
Too Much Talking, Not Enough Doing
“This meeting could have been an email!” is the disgruntled utterance of every person who sits back in their chair, directs their eyes from other meeting attendees to the ceiling, and thinks “This is why I have to work late all the time.”
Email is not a good tool for these conversations because inboxes are already flooded with notes from external partners, vendors, volunteers, marketers, application push notifications, and pretty much anyone who has your email who thinks you might buy what they sell.
That’s why pulling out as many internal discussions from email is important, followed by a hard look at what constitutes the need for a real-time conversation between team members. Slack’s superiority at moving internal discussions into channels and threads allows you to significantly reduce the amount of meetings scheduled (and scheduling them is a lot of work to begin with), and greatly improve the quality of the discussions conducted in meetings.
Put this together and this means decisions get made more efficiently, and with that efficiency comes increased productivity, and with that increased productivity comes your staff taking more pride in the work they do and accomplish, and the ability to balance their work-life obligations better.
The “Always On” Problem
Since the pandemic shifted so many people to working remotely, and the ensuing - if not faltering - return to office backswing, many people find themselves trapped in the worst of both worlds. They go into an office many days of the week and are expected to be responsive, either formally or informally, when they are at home. Working across time zones, often a necessity, compounds this problem.
This is a recipe for burnout disaster. The idea of creating proper boundaries for rest, reflection, and recharging is so clear that I will not spend time providing evidence. Suffice it to say, that employees who feel like they are always on will either burn out in the short term or suffer terribly in the long term.
If your organization wants to craft policies that allow for flexibility and for people to find time to tune out from work so they can take care of their own wellness, Slack has a few key features that enable that. Slack users can pause notifications when they are taking time off or are done for the day (or even just delete the app from their phone and then redownload it when they are back). Slack’s scheduled posts allow someone who on a Saturday remembers they need to ask someone something to type out that message immediately but then schedule the message to be sent at 9 am on Monday. The person working on a Saturday has done the work they need to do, and the person resting on the weekend won’t be disturbed by it until they are back at their desk Monday morning.
These features give companies and organizations multiple options to craft policies that allow people’s time off to be minimally disrupted by other people’s time on. That allows individuals to find their own balance of productivity and rest, which will sustain them over the long run.
Employees Feel Isolated
Studies, literature, and op-eds all flood our screens with an overarching narrative: despite technology, people feel increasingly isolated from one another. Remote work only compounds that if you are not intentional with how to avoid it, and have the tools to do so.
Because channels are easy to create in Slack, and organized around topics, Slack is a powerful tool to allow people to find others with similar interests and bond over those interests. Here at Arkus, social channels include dog lovers, cat lovers, NFL fans, food and recipe sharers, health and wellness devotees, and even particular television shows. This is how I have learned about the interests of so many of my colleagues, and how in turn they have learned about me. I feel far more connected to my co-workers because Slack has given us a space to find each other and message to our hearts’ delights about all the non-work things that make us who we are. This is a huge morale booster and goes a great distance in breaking down the walls of isolation that so many suffer from in their workplace.
Employees Want to Praise and be Praised by Each Other
Employees want to feel valued at their work. That usually happens through promotion, raises, nominations for awards and programs, etc. Those all require formal processes and in some cases budget allocation, making them harder to come by than they should be, and that creates a vacuum for recognition. Additionally, they mostly involve competing with others and can get caught in bureaucratic processes.
At Arkus, we have a channel that allows anyone at Arkus to post a laudatory message highlighting the great work another Arkus employee did. Sometimes the post is a manager praising a report, sometimes it is not. What makes it so special is that it is a crowd-sourced, noncompetitive way for people to feel validated and to express their appreciation of others. And since it’s in Slack, these announcements do not have to wait for a team or company meeting, they can be shared in the moment. That also means they don’t have to be big accomplishments, indeed they are often small and of the nature of “John made this comment in a meeting yesterday, and it got me thinking differently about the problem I was solving. Thanks John!”
This is a simple way that Slack has enabled Arkus to create a culture of cross-collaboration and cross-celebration, and that makes all the difference in the world for any company’s culture.
Arkus is a high-performing, innovative company with a culture of efficiency, collaboration, accomplishment, and even joy — Slack is critical to creating and maintaining that culture, and it can serve as a critical means to do the same for your organization.
Want to chat about Slack and company culture? Find me on Linkedin and let’s chat, or reach out to our team to learn more about how we can help using our contact form.
