Communication is key. It’s often heralded as the most important element of any relationship. Certainly, when it comes to business relationships, this is completely true. At MeloTel, our entire company is based on helping people to communicate with each other. So, it only makes sense for the members of the MeloTel team to be good communicators.
Thankfully, we make use of an awesome app that helps us to communicate with each other every day – inside and outside of the office. Perhaps, you’ve heard of it. It’s known as Slack.
Are you using Slack?
Ironically, the name Slack doesn’t quite describe just how awesome this app is. If you ask us, it’s more “slick” than anything. It functions as an instant messenger that allows users to send and receive messages that are received in real-time. It’s not unlike the group chats that are enabled group chats on other messaging apps. However, the difference with Slack is that it was designed primarily for business use.
For example, with Slack, the MeloTel team is able to organize conversations into different topics. Referred to as “channels”, there are different chats that can be set up to help all of our team members streamline their ideas in each conversation. The channels appear as hashtags (nice and modern, right?) that are essentially headings that inform users about what the conversations are all about.
One of our hashtags is #blog.
So, quite obviously, any time any of our team members wishes to share his/her blog ideas with the rest of the team, this is the channel that is used for that conversation. Of course, Slack also allows for direct messaging so that any two employees can have private conversations with each other.
On Business.com, Clayton Dean explains how Slack has helped businesses to waste less time and significantly improve productivity. “Based on Slack’s own surveys of its users, the San Francisco-based startup boasts 25 fewer meetings, 32 percent more productivity, and almost 50 percent fewer emails within offices communicating via Slack,” he informs.
Slack promotes team building.
One of the things we like best about Slack, here at MeloTel, is that it allows us to easily hold group conversations without holding traditional meetings. This is important because we do have employees who don’t work at the location of our headquarters. These team members are just as easily made a part of our group chats as the ones who sit directly beside each other each day.
Dean highlights the fact that Slack is known to encourage brainstorming and the sharing of various ideas amongst co-workers in a much more effective way than email. “Slack opens up the channels of communication that email keeps closed,” he writes, “One central benefit of this is the greater opportunity for creative collaboration, even across divisions and project designations.”
If you’re not yet using Slack to help your employees communicate with each other, we’d highly recommend that you start today! For information about to get started on Slack, please don’t hesitate to contact us at 1-888-MELOTEL or use the Live Chat feature on our website!