Dreading a long and unproductive work meeting? What if you could opt out? That is precisely what Jiva, an agri-marketing and tech company, allows its employees to do. Before the start of a meeting, those invited receive an automated reminder on Slack asking them if they have anything important to brief.
“If most people answer ‘no’, the meeting will be cancelled and everyone gets 90 minutes back in their day. This means we’re not having meetings for the sake of meetings – everyone feels empowered to cancel a meeting if it’s not going to drive work forward,” says Mr Nav Pawera, Jiva’s head of design.
This is just one example of how productivity platform Slack empowers Jiva’s employees to be more efficient. Jiva connects farmers to the marketplace, especially via e-commerce, by providing agricultural finance and advisory services.
The company is headquartered in Singapore but works with farmers in India and Indonesia. Employees are often out in the field working with farmers in remote locations with poor connectivity. Having to work with team members and clients in different countries and time zones requires unique solutions.
“Our work requires us to spend a lot of time in the field with the farmers. As we are not always at our desks, and all run on different schedules, asynchronous discussions often work best for us,” says Mr Pawera.
“This is precisely what makes Slack a crucial tool that ensures effective communication,” he adds. With its chat and video messaging features, Slack allows individual team members to catch up on focal discussions at a timing that suits their own schedule.
Enabling team members to work flexibly
To optimise asynchronous work – that is, work that is being done by individuals at different times – Jiva uses Slack’s tools like clips and Workflow Builder.
Clips is a versatile platform to exchange video content, which is crucial for teams operating on disparate schedules. Employees can record video or audio clips of themselves, sharing updates, announcements or results for their team to view at their own convenience.
Others can watch or listen to the recordings at their preferred speed, managing their own time better while keeping up with a natural cadence of communication. Mr Pavera values the human connection that Slack provides. He says: “We often try to discuss things asynchronously – using chat and recorded video messages. Being able to record videos for asynchronous communications, and huddles for quick calls, helps a lot in communicating better.”
Jiva also uses Workflow Builder to automate repetitive tasks so that team members can focus on more value-added work. The tool is used to automate a variety of tasks: reviewing team productivity every fortnight, collecting feedback and gathering questions to address during company-wide town hall meetings.
Reducing communication friction
Like Jiva, rewards and payments platform ShopBack also uses Slack to integrate various workflows. The Slack Canvas tool, for instance, allows employees to track updates and review them on the fly.
Canvas creates a central digital space so that teams reduce the communication friction and delays that can occur with collaborative projects. Rich text formatting allows employee tagging (via the “@” function) and channel tags, using hashtags to streamline note-taking, update action lists and brief stakeholders.
“Slack has replaced daily stand-ups, saving between 30 and 45 minutes every day,” says Mr San Oo, ShopBack’s chief technology officer, referring to the short, routine meetings where team members briefly report on what they are working on. “That’s a huge amount of time saved over the weeks and months that we’re able to spend on improving our offering to customers.”
Having a unified productivity platform like Slack has also enabled ShopBack to build a culture of trust and transparency. For instance, team leaders and members are able to share timely updates and lessons learnt to speed up putting ideas into action. Slack has also enhanced ShopBack's culture of transparency by facilitating easy direct communication between employees and the leadership team.
Because Slack is a platform familiar to many workers and companies, it is easy for ShopBack to communicate and collaborate with partners and clients. For instance, a feature called Slack Connect lets staff members from the e-commerce company collaborate securely with external partners, and is more efficient than traditional methods like emailing because it enables real-time messaging for quicker resolution of issues or questions.
Looking to further improve communication and collaboration, Slack has announced a new feature called Slack AI, that incorporates generative AI capabilities into its platform. This includes automatically generating channel and thread summaries, as well as enabling users to search answers within Slack using AI.
By leveraging years’ worth of archived conversations and organisational knowledge, this feature can provide employees with helpful context and background for their work. For example, Slack AI can gather and summarise previous discussions around projects, incidents and decisions to help inform current tasks.
Additionally, Slack AI may assist employees returning from extended leave by creating summaries to get quickly up to date on recent messages. This aims to save time otherwise spent reading backlogs of messages.
“Slack AI, built natively on our platform, will allow all employees to have access to AI tools that can streamline manual work and boost productivity for teams,” says Mr Ramesh Gopal Krishna, regional vice-president of Slack Asean, Salesforce.
E-commerce firm ShopBack is interested in using the new Slack AI tool to explore possibilities such as automating tasks or stimulating new ideas.
"Generative AI applications such as ChatGPT and Slack AI have the potential to revolutionise the way we communicate and work,” says Mr San of ShopBack. “They can free up employees' time and energy to focus on other tasks that will have a greater impact.”
Find out how Slack can help boost productivity and collaboration here.
