Why Frontiers 2021 Convinced Us that the Future of Work is Inside Slack
Slack’s annual conference (its first since becoming part of Salesforce in July) went fully virtual in 2021, but it was as jam-packed as ever with exciting announcements, inspiring speakers, and well-curated playlists. Educational sessions were held for those using Slack for engineering, IT, marketing, service, sales and much more. After the first broadcast on November 16 and 17, the events and keynote sessions (including ours!) are now available on demand until January 2022. Register now to start watching and learning!
In the meantime, here’s a look at the ideas and key takeaways that left the biggest impression on us.
Organizations gain competitive advantages by using Slack.
1. Slack helps make your company a better place to work.
This year Frontiers reiterated the value of Slack in a world where remote working and distributed teams are here to stay. Retrofitting old office norms to remote teams just hasn’t worked. Over the last two years, employee expectations have changed, and unhappy employees are willing to switch jobs (taking career risks and pay cuts) and even quit the workforce entirely. To retain talent, leaders need to reimagine work from the ground up, giving people the flexibility and freedom to work on their schedules, from wherever they are, while still maintaining a cohesive and engaged company culture. Slack can help.
By using Slack as your digital HQ, you make it easier for people from across locations and time zones to work together. Slack’s public channels, threads, huddles and prerecorded video clips cut down on team meetings and video call fatigue and enable seamless asynchronous communication. In combination with other tools, Slack can also be a place where you lead with transparency, which makes employees feel more connected to the organization as a whole.
As for creating connections between remote workers, using social channels in Slack is a great place to start. (#pets, #diy, #cooking, and #puns are among our most popular!) At R&P, we also use the Donut app to facilitate conversations between talent and host virtual activities in Slack, from our Halloween pet costume contest to regular fit bingo challenges that encourage physical and mental wellness for our talent.
2. Work gets done faster with Slack workflows, especially when integrated with Salesforce.
One tool that kept getting highlighted at Frontiers was Workflow Builder. Workflow Builder lets users automate recurring tasks in Slack, with no coding required, and we’re super proud that this tool that’s been used to create over 400,000 workflows was created here at R&P. (Our team called it Missions before Slack acquired the product.)
Since the merger, Slack and Salesforce have been working on a number of integrations uniting the two platforms. As a result, we expect Workflow Builder’s usage to keep rising rapidly as companies take advantage of powerful Slack + Salesforce workflows that reach across the entire customer lifecycle and Salesforce product portfolio. Slack apps and integrations also allow people to interact with systems, documents and data without wasting time on tiresome context-switching.
Also fueling Workflow Builder’s growth will also be the new option to use conditional logic (if/then statements) along with a building blocks framework that will make creating and deploying workflows easier than ever for developers and non-developers.
3. Slack Connect improves relationships with clients and partners.
Enhancements are coming soon to the popular Slack Connect! With Slack Connect, your team can collaborate with everyone from partners to vendors to customers. For example, your sales and business development talent can forge strong relationships with prospective clients in a shared channel, answering questions quickly and closing deals faster. From there, project delivery talent or customer relations teams can step up to impress your new client with top-of-the-line service and regular updates on your work together.
So what’s changing for Slack Connect? At Frontiers, Slack announced that in early 2022, Slack Connect will allow up to 250 organizations to work together within one channel! Later in 2022, Slack will allow customers to create secure environments for collaborating on projects that involve thousands of partners.
Developing custom Slack apps is about to get even easier.
Our developers are excited about all the Slack development news coming out of Frontiers. For starters, there’s the news that Slack will be offering hosting of both Slack applications and data on the Slack cloud. “This takes SO much of the complexity of building a Slack app out and allows companies to take full advantage of the Slack APIs without worrying about hosting costs or infrastructure. Providing hosting (and data storage!) to workspaces will simplify so many of the steps of creating a new app,” says James Conway, our Slack lead who attended Frontiers.
Plus, Slack introduced a new CLI (command line interface) tool and software development kit (SDK). These tools will reduce the time and effort required for creating, managing and deploying Slack apps and allow many processes to become fully automatable. “The usage of the Slack CLI and its ability to deploy applications will be massively useful once it is released. This will point all Slack developers in the right direction in building apps for Slack’s new cloud infrastructure,” says James.
James is also confident that the new Workflow Builder framework with reusable building blocks will be a gamechanger for R&P and our clients, simplifying the process for creating the workflows they need. To enhance automation and workflows even further, developers will also be able to add metadata that allow Slack apps to communicate with each other.
Ready to learn more?
Check out all the content from Frontiers for yourself. Don’t miss our session on Building your new digital HQ with Slack-first solutions, where we explore best practices and share Slack-based solutions we’ve created for clients across industries.
You can also find more about our work on our Slack services page or get in touch with us directly at hello@robotsandpencils.com! We’d love to hear how you’re using Slack in your business today and discuss opportunities for getting even more out of this amazing platform.
