4 Tips to Boost Productivity with Slack | Salesforce on Salesforce

What's up everyone? My name's Kevin and today we're talking about how to boost productivity in Slack. We'll talk about common workplace bottlenecks. Then I'll give you four tips that'll help turbocharge your work with a few examples of how we do it here at Salesforce. Sound good? Awesome. Let's jump in. Welcome to Salesforce on Salesforce, an inside look at our sales, service, marketing and IT businesses with helpful how to tips you can use for your business. We'll help you save on costs with Autom, be more efficient with productivity tools, and so so much more. As always, you can learn more on Trailhead, Salesforce's online learning platform for more information on this topic and many others that you might find useful for your business. Now, it's no secret that global organizations are tightening their budgets. Fortunately, there are digital first solutions that empower organizations and teams to work faster and get more value out of their already made investments. Meet Slack Slack connects your people, tools, customers and partners for faster and more flexible work. Consider it the command center of your workday. Here are four easy to use tips that you can use in Slack right now to help you reclaim focus and preserve your most precious time. Replace Meetings this first tip is all about how we can cancel meetings while getting more work done. In recent years, the number of meetings workers attend has risen by an average of 13.5%, according to the Harvard Business Review. The study also found employee productivity was 71% higher when meetings were reduced by 40%. Clearly, cutting back on meetings is key to seeing productivity gains. One way organizations are reducing meetings is by using Slack to communicate in real time. In fact, 83% of employees preferred using tools like Slack over traditional one to one meetings because it saved them time and that beautiful calendar space. Now don't worry, we're not saying that you should cancel all your meetings, but since they are your company's most expensive means of collaboration, they should definitely be used intentionally. Slack offers two simple yet powerful solutions to reduce the amount of meetings on your calendar. First up, we have clips you can send video or audio messages right inside of Slack. Clips offers a flexible alternative to meetings because others can watch when it's convenient for them. They can adjust the playback speed, they can emoji, react, reply in threads, and best of all, the clips are automatically transcribed so everything you say is searchable. It's amazing. Now if you're wondering when to use this feature, Clips saves our teams time by replacing full length meetings for things like status updates and design feedback and sharing ideas. They also allow teams in different time zones to work together more easily, more seamlessly, and without asking people to be logged on beyond their working hours. Second, we have huddles. Huddles are a lightweight and audio first way to communicate with right inside of Slack. With just the click of a button, you can invite an entire channel, a group of people, or even just a single person into a live sync. And the best part is my favorite part. There's no pressure to meet for a certain amount of time, like those dreaded 60 minute calendar blocks that we all know about. That way you can meet for however long as needed to get the job done and then move on. Huddles also allow for multi person screen sharing, a dedicated thread to take notes and animate emoji and stickers so we can make virtual get togethers that much more enjoyable. Here at Salesforce and Slack, we love using huddles to reduce formal meetings, especially for things like debriefs, reviews, troubleshooting or brainstorming. Replace Emails Our next tip is about your inbox, which right now is probably overflowing with unwanted and unnecessary emails. When work gets busy, communication can get messy. Email threads start to pile up and then they're filled with those one word responses, missing attachments, and an ever expanding list of people to cc. I mean, do people even still use BCC anymore? I don't know. The good news is with Slack, emails at Salesforce are down 42% from FY21. So let's explore the three ways that we can rid ourselves of the email nightmare once and for all with Slack Channels. Slack Channel Benefit Number one Channels organize your work in a way that makes sense to you. Instead of one crowded inbox for every single individual reply, Slack Channels organize your work around a specific topic, team or project so all your teams, files and history are all in one convenient location. Slack Channel Benefit number two Channels provide transparency and they improve alignment by giving you and your team a shared view of the work that's being done so no information gets lost in someone's inbox silo, no one gets left out of the loop, and new project members, when they join, they have full context and Slack Channel Benefit number three channels create a searchable library of knowledge so content in Slack Channels is searchable. That means that there's no need to forward a bunch of emails, ping a bunch of coworkers, or spend hours digging in different places for that one thing that you've been looking for. Tip number three Use automation. From fielding requests to getting new team members in the know our workdays are filled with manual yet necessary tasks that can slow productivity to a halt. Slack's Workflow Builder gives anyone, and I mean anyone in your company, the tools to simplify and automate that work. In fact, 77% of service agents say that automating routine tasks allows them to focus on more complex work. According to a recent Salesforce State of Service report, Slack's Workflow Builder is a visual tool that allows any user to automate routine tasks. By creating custom workflows in just a few minutes, you can have a seamless way to standardize how you collect requests from your team to report any outage in real time to get new team members up to speed with welcome messages and so so much more. You can even create workflows that automatically send information to tools like Jira, Salesforce, Google Sheets and Trello. And you can pull information from these apps into Slack. Now if the word automation sounds intimidating, don't worry. Workflow Builder is a no code tool and most people who regularly use it are non technical, including me. Tip 4 Reduce context switching alright, for our final productivity tip, let's talk about context switching now. A recent study from Harvard found that many employees are toggling between tools about 1200 times per day. Think about how much time that adds up to over a week, a month, a year. That's a lot of wasted time. Thanks to Slack's ability to keep Your attention in one place, businesses on average experience up to 20 faster decision making as a result. And thankfully, Slack connects with many of your favorite apps and tools so you can spend less time juggling screens and more time doing meaningful work. With apps in Slack, you can do amazing things like quickly find, share and act on information, create and respond to calendar events, receive real time updates, collaborate on files, speed up incident resolution, and so much more. Salesforce Customer 360 also seamlessly integrates with Slack so your teams don't have to switch between tools or Salesforce solutions. Now teams across sales, service and marketing can share a single view of the customer and have unified conversations about different accounts, opportunities, campaigns and more, all within Slack. So to sum up tip 4 spend less time switching screens and more time doing meaningful things. Wow, we have covered so much great content in this video. To recap, Slack reduces unnecessary meetings, emails, manual tasks and context switching to free up serious focus to make your working life simpler, more pleasant and a lot more productive. To learn more, check out the other resources provided and be sure to watch the other episodes in this series for more helpful how to tips on on how to turbocharge your productivity and bring more value to your business. See you next time.