Slack is one of the most popular and easy-to-use team management tools used by businesses in different industries. It allows creating several workplaces, for different companies or different projects within one company, and managing them from a single application.
Along with project and employee management, Slack also enhances collaboration between teams and their members in order to save the high productivity of the company performance.
So we have collected the best practices of how to properly organize our work process within the Slack application and how these tips may help your team become more efficient.
Think of creativeness first
Businesses of different specializations are willing to stay in-game and compete with other companies in the area. It entails the need for fresh and creative ideas related to business strategies and plans of development. Make sure you create teams that consist of different specialists and people with diverse skills and characters.
Being creative in the modern world is a real challenge, and your teams have to be ready to cope with it and find the right solution to all your requests. Slack as a convenient communication tool provides the ability to split teams into different chats or even workplaces related to certain work projects.
Define the duties and responsibilities for each member of each team
The work processes become smooth and simple if each employee is aware of their direct responsibilities and tasks they need to execute. This is especially important to dilute in hybrid workplaces where several workers perform within the same projects or tasks. To avoid mix-ups and misunderstandings, the project managers should assign particular duties to each team member. Slack makes this process much easier by tagging the needed person and assigning tasks to them.
Slack can also be integrated with other project management tools like Workast, for example, so if you want to check up on a task that needs to be done, you can make a comment on the task and a notification will be sent to the team member in Slack.
Enhance the collaboration within teams
Joining particular employees into teams doesn’t really encourage them to collaborate, as sometimes these workers are complete strangers to each other. It can have a negative impact on the outcome of the execution of your projects as each team member will be on its mind.
So along with discussing the work within Slack channels, you can also create chats for the entire company just for friendly communication. When people are more than teammates and trust each other, then the project will flow seamlessly and productively.
Allow teams to make decisions
Trust from chiefs to teams is no less important than trusting relationships between team members. The overall employee productivity and efficiency partially depend on the attitude of their bosses and team leads.
It is recommended to show trust and reliable behavior to all team members and allow them to make vital decisions depending on the specifics of their tasks. Sometimes less control can bring much more profitable and better results than strict monitoring of each action of your teams.
Ensure the meetings are planned
Nowadays, most businesses work online as they have already learned how to effectively manage remote teams and save a high level of productivity. Eventually, all meetings and discussions are held online, where Slack is a great helper as it provides no limitations to the meeting duration and number of participants.
Although, some companies conduct plenty of unnecessary calls that have no purpose, besides controlling the teams. So it is advisable to have an agenda for each upcoming call to precisely define the duration of these online meetings, the questions you want to discuss, and people who will be engaged in this discussion. Such practice will help you save time for more vital tasks and also be aware of all the latest changes within the projects.
Monitor the productivity of the teams
There are cases when tasks are assigned to the wrong people, meaning their skills are not suitable for the execution of particular responsibilities. It doesn’t have to lead to firing these people, but you should constantly monitor the execution of the tasks and their outcomes (if the results correlate to initial goals).
Teamwork entails collaboration and dependencies on each other. So if a certain part of the project is not executed properly, it can turn into project failure. So make sure each team member fits his\her place and duties on the project.
Educate your staff
The process of skill development is never-ending and always actual. Employees are not likely to think much of their education as they are occupied at work. However, you can make them focus on skill growth and enhance corporate education through webinars, workshops, conferences, industry-related courses, and so on.
Corporate education enhances team collaboration and helps your employees to keep their skills at a high level in order to properly execute their tasks within a team, develop trust between workers, and better engage in the job specifics. Slack can be used as a platform for online classes, for asking the teammates to help writing my paper, discussion in chats or during meetings, sharing thoughts, learning documents, experiences, and impressions for education with each other.
Learn the employee feedback
One-to-one conversations are still supposed to be one of the most efficient ways to boost employee satisfaction and overall productivity. Team building and general meetings are important, however in addition you need to know the feedback of each employee to find out what challenges and issues they may face every day and try to find solutions to them. This practice helps avoid conflicts and misunderstandings within teams and satisfy each employee with the suitable conditions of work.
In conclusion
To sum up the above-mentioned team collaboration tips, we would like to note that each team and its members require individual approaches and attitudes depending on their needs and specifics. However, there are things that are valuable for all employees – trust, transparency, and readiness to support their ideas and help with the problems.
This article is a guest blog written by Nancy Howard. To contribute a guest post to Workast.com, please complete the expression of interest form here.