How hotels.ng uses Slack

Slack is a popular communication tool that companies and teams worldwide use. At hotels.ng, we use Slack too, but in ways that best suit our company culture and that bring out the best in us. Slack was originally designed to enable communication in a team that was put together to design an online game. The game was not a commercial success, but the team recognised the value in the communication tool that they had built and developed it to be even more useful and effective. Hotels.ng is unique in ways that make it enjoy Slack’s best features. One is the way the staff are set up: in a company where communication across all staff levels is encouraged and the relevance of staff ranking is minimised, Slack’s ability to instantly connect intern to CEO helps to sustain this arrangement. Two, the company has staff and interns that work from several states in Nigeria, and from across the world too. This setup requires instant collaboration for success to be achieved, and Slack helps to ensure that through features such as virtual offices, file sharing and staff wide announcement, teamwork exists. A few of the ways that we provide solutions and use Slack at hotels.ng are outlined below:

1. Hotels.ng uses Slack to conduct in-house polls, say, deciding on a date for the office end of the year party.

   

   Sometimes, just as in a democracy, the ridiculous option wins, but who doesn’t want a four-day long party?
2. To track bank credit alerts, Neo the company's CTO, designed a system that alerts the members of the finance team whenever the company gets a new credit alert from any bank.

   

3. Using Slack, time of entry and exit of staff are recorded. This helps staff who are stranded in traffic or that are facing emergencies alert relevant persons and make up for the time lost at their convenience –a win-win, the staff wins, the company does too.

    

4. Using a simple but powerful IFTTT integration, scheduled messages are passed to the team. My favourite was the “Hello, good morning” automated message, but that was before I got the “Lunch orders start by 10am” message which prompts staff to log in their lunch order for the day. Through the IFTTT tool, hotels.ng is able to automate simple but repeated tasks thereby freeing up personnel for more important activities.

   

5. A library channel that is open to everyone was created to share things learnt, interesting articles, the occasional pointless statistic, tips and lifehacks. This channel helps to create a healthy break from the work flow, provide talking points and encourage bonding over topics as diverse as the conviction rates in Chinese prisons or the meaning of the word Pakistan. Everybody learns something every day, everybody shares something too.

   

All of these hacks and more ensure faster decision making, significantly reduce email pile up, bridge team communication, and cut communication costs ensuring that more funds and time can be invested in creating more value for clients that make hotel reservations through the hotels.ng platform. If you ever visit us at Hotels.ng and hear people asking to be slapped, listen closely, it just might be “hey, slack me”.

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