Slack

Comentarios: We can definitely communicate with almost no exceptions. It takes the "where is this person" out of the equation as you can just send them a message and know when they come online and see it. The benefits to not just sitting and waiting on an answered email are endless.

Puntos a favor: I don't remember how my team communicated before Slack. It keeps my coworkers connected in and out of the office. It cuts down on our emails and makes communication easy. There are a lot of apps and integrations that can be added to automate processes. You can integrate project management tools, Google Docs, Spotify, Canto DAM, Giphy for some fun with coworkers and so many more. I love that I can drag and drop files, images and videos into slack to share with my coworkers. In addition, slack allows free integration with many other tools out there. My peers who are software developers talk about how easy it is in the backend for integration. Slack is easy to use and has great built in functions for notifications. It has really been extremely helpful to get multiple departments talking at times and keep each department informed while not in the same location. The ability to upload files makes it easy to share ideas.

Contras: The Screen sharing could be improved, along with mic recognizing. When network connectivity is lost during screen sharing or calls, the reconnect feature doesn't seem to work really efficiently. My biggest complaint is that Slack makes you way too available. You're expected to know whats going on whether you are at home sick or in the office working. Sometimes the app on the phone won't clear your notifications even after reading or checking through them.

Comentarios: We used slack as a company both to facilitate communication across all teams (a tech start up that grew from 20 people to 120 people while I was there) and run basic options (e.g. submit bugs to the product team). It helped us build a strong culture of bonding over personal news broadcasts and basic company updates, and also improved our productivity in certain processes. In other aspects, it was definitely a huge distraction. I would say it's worth integrating with clear guidelines for etiquette.

Puntos a favor: Once you get the hang of it, it's really well designed, easy to use and really fun. They have so many integrations that make it easy to customize it for a company and yet let each individual employee personalize it for themselves (names, gifs, emoji's, etc). It's a streamlined way to get a simple answer back or stay in touch with employees you don't happen to be sitting next to. You avoid email overload.

Contras: It can be a HUGE time suck and it was very hard to be off slack at any point. This is probably company dependent, but I was as a tech start-up and it was so easy to spend hours of my day messaging people about work or non-work related topics. This can be fine, unless you're trying to get something meaningful done. People would slack during meetings rather than be fully present. That made no sense to me -- if you're going to be in a meeting, BE in a meeting. I also felt like I couldn't get off slack on nights and weekends. Again -- that's a company wide decision, but there was an aspect of slack like texting that made people felt like they had to respond when they got a message. Even if you don't respond, it still drives up anxiety to have notifications pop up.