Take Another Look at Your Usage of Slack or Microsoft Teams
A lot of organizations organically adopted Slack or Teams, either as early adopters or from the outside force of the Covid-19 pandemic shifting how we work. Let's look at three areas where most organizations stand to benefit from as it relates to how they're using Slack or Teams.
Integrating apps for alerting and visualizations
Integrations are easy to build for Slack and Teams, which enables you to connect to other systems in your organization (Zapier, Power Platform, and Make are available for no-code / low-code integrations). These are useful for sending notifications (instead of email alerts) when data changes or to see dashboards that are relevant to each group as you bounce around discussions.
Dipping your toe into AI with bots
Similar to integrations, you can add bots to both Slack and Teams. These bots can be the entry point for how employees engage with generative AI. Consider using one bot as a proxy for an existing model like OpenAI's gpt-4o, then add additional bots that are defined as assistants with a specific scope (e.g. employee handbook bot).
Collaborating with outsiders
Anecdotally, this is significantly easier to do with Slack than Teams, although both offer the ability to add people from outside of your organization. This is a great feature if you are working on a project with a vendor, have a mixed resourcing strategy around employees and independent consultants, or have a management consultant providing ongoing advisory services.
Time for a Self-Assessment
If you answer "no" to some or all of these questions, it's time to take another look at how your organization is leveraging Slack or Teams:
Are you using Slack or Teams for real time notifications when data changes instead of relying on email alerts?
Are you using Slack or Teams channels to organize discussions by project or department to reduce clutter and improve focus?
Do you send quick video and screen share messages to provide async feedback?
Have you integrated dashboards or visualizations directly into your Slack or Teams channels for quick access and referencing in discussions?
Are you leveraging bots with generative AI to help employees with their tasks?
TLDR: Check how you're using Slack or Teams. Ask yourself whether there are features that could improve collaboration.
