Why Slack Makes Me Love My Team

At Redox, we rely on Slack to communicate every single day, and while it's core value lies in it's sheer utility, there are plenty of other reasons we've come to love using it that aren't entirely related to work.

Slack enables us to stay in close touch with our remote team members and get to know them more easily than through regular email or phone calls. While most of our channels are work related, we also have a healthy amount devoted to outside interests and activities. It's a heck of a lot easier to get to know new team members quickly when there's ample space to let their personalities shine through. For a team who encourages it's employees to work and live where they want, that's immensely important. 

Here are just a few of the channels and functions of Slack that makes us love our team.  

#1. Lolcommits 

Everytime one of our developers commits code, their camera is set up to take a picture of the moment they submit their work. This is a "Lolcommit", and there's a whole channel devoted to capturing the special expressions of sheer happiness and elation that often accompanies the completion of a coding project. We've been using lolcommits since we started building Redox, and once I figured how to post them to Slack, they became the best way to feel in touch with fellow developers working remotely.

#2. Things Devin Says

Yes, this is a channel, and it's dedicated entirely to Devin Soelberg and his seemingly countless witicisms, malapropisms, and general guru-level knowledge of healthcare IT. He is literally the guy you would hope would have a channel created and dedicated to chronicling every funny thing he says, and he does, because we did.

Things we heard Devin say in the wild:

#3. High 5s

Another problem facing a remote team is the ability to adequately congratulate people on a job well done. Nothing is quite as good as an enthusastic, in-person high five from Luke, but when you're not living in Madison, getting a shout-out on our High 5s channel is a close second. 

#4. Custom Emojis

Sometimes, the 722 standard emojis just don't cover quite everything you need to emoji about. Creating custom emojis has been a great source of fun for our team, with a few of our favorites being our R^ logo, snidely, a smiling Drake face, and an animated gif of the team jumping. 

Some good slackmoji here: https://slackmojis.com/

#5. Slackbot Interjects

Our Slackbot is sassy and it's going to have some fun with you, whether you're in the mood for it or not. If anyone says "jump", "chya", "woo", or "bam", slackbot responds with the animated gif of our team jumping. If you write "oh yeah" you get a gif of the kool-aid man breaking through a wall. There are a few other instances of the slackbot chiming in, but it may be considered inappropriate to mention here.

like this:

#6. /giphy[text]

When you're at a loss for words, or just want to entertain people beyond a simple witticism, responding with a random animated gif has become the standard team MO. Always good for adding a bit of levity, the results are sometimes humorous, sometimes confusing, and would sometimes be inappropriate if we couldn't blame the gif on a random algorithm responsible for gif selection. And every once in a while, it turns up a gif so on-point, so funny, and so well-executed that everyone stops what they're doing and applauds. 

#7. User Groups and Aliases

To help distinguish between our growing team of guys-with-similar-names, we've added some aliases and user groups to help grab a few people's attention at a time. For example, our dev team is lovingly titled @nerds. For our one-person aliases, @sweetandy, and @savoryandy help us differentiate when @andy would be ambiguous (still looking for a qualified applicant for @saltyandy to round-out our flavor-themed-Andy-trifecta!)

#8. Random

You may not expect a channel dedicated to various, non-work-related content to aid productivity, but it does. We at Redox like to have our fun, but we know when it's important to focus and be productive as well. We use the #random channel to take fun/distracting posts that would otherwise find their way to your #general channel, and put it somewhere else where it can happily live and thrive amongst other non-work related posts and comments. When you see something appear in #random, you know you'll be entertained by looking at it, but you also know it's never important and can wait until you are ready for a break. 

How does your team slack?