Upping Productivity the Slack Way
Upping Productivity the Slack Way was established in , Built by in .
Organisations invest so much on reducing inefficiency and improving their output. This holds true for hotels.ng too, and to achieve this, we have found ways to use available tools to ensure better communication amongst staff –on-site and remote, while increasing productivity in the process.
In this piece, we look at how hotels.ng has exploited Slack’s features to solve problems of communication delay. Slack is a real-time communication tool that was originally built to improve teamwork in a team put together to build a PC game. Commercially, the game was a failure, but Slack rose from those ashes – the silver lining of a failed project.
Hotels.ng, Nigeria’s biggest hotel booking organisation has two unique attributes that make it exploit Slack’s best features. One is the unconventional way the staff structure is set up. In a company where communication across all staff levels is encouraged and the relevance of staff hierarchy 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 staff structure requires real time collaboration to achieve success, and Slack helps to ensure that through features such as virtual offices, an instant file sharing and staff wide announcement, collaboration exists.
Some of the ways that we provide solutions and increase productivity at hotels.ng using Slack are outlined below;
Sometimes, just as in a democracy, the ridiculous option wins, but who doesn’t want a four day long party?
- Hotels.ng creatively 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?
- A bank credit alert was built and integrated into the company’s Slack to enable the finance team who according to Neo, the CTO should get instant notification of cash inflow on the same platform that they communicate.
- 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.
- 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. This particular message prompts staffs to log in their lunch order which start to roll in by noon. Through the IFTTT tool, hotels.ng is able to automate recurrent activities thereby freeing up personnel for more important activities.
- 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 concept of déjà vu to China’s incarceration culture. Everybody learns something every day, everybody shares something too.
