![]() All-hands are hugely important to our culture. I think it’s incredible for a company of this size. We have an AMA channel – we’re not using Slido – yet. Stewart, our CEO, travels to all these places and hosts all-hands once a month. Keep in mind, Slack has 1,000 employees and we’re on every continent but Africa and Antarctica. We’ve got a really strong culture of all-hands, and it’s one of the things I love about Slack. When you talk about culture and the role meetings play in it, what about meetings like all-hands meetings and those big team meetings? Do you have them monthly at Slack? Make sure you have the right people in the room, but sometimes it’s even more important not to have the wrong people there. Most of my team is in San Francisco, I live in New York, we have people in Dublin and we still have a weekly check-in meeting that’s not about letting everybody know what you’re working on but that is more of a team culture aspect – just reminding everyone what you sound like. I feel like there are a lot of conversations that happen on Slack that could have been quickly resolved in a meeting. What makes you think something requires a meeting instead of sending a quick Slack message or an email? ![]() But I think for the most part, there is a standard meeting etiquette, like have an agenda or make sure everyone in the room actually needs to be there. You’ve got a record of it right there and people don’t have to rush to the office in the morning, which could be a real blocker. It’s amazing how powerful something like that is. We have a dedicated check-in channel, where we just set up a simple reminder, for example, every morning at 10.00 a.m., post in threads what your check-in status is. The first thing that you can do is to eliminate check-in meetings, like stand ups. Yes, believe it or not, we still have a few meetings at Slack. It’s interesting to see that technology has evolved in many ways, but we still seem to be organizing meetings in the same way – do you see any best practices or any ways in which Slack is helping? ![]() Slack reduces the number of meetings that might otherwise have been unproductive. Unfortunately, we don’t have a secret sauce, there are still many meetings that I leave and think that was not a good use of my half-hour. ![]() The minute we gather around we need to figure out how to have these conversations. We don’t have any magical thing or an AI bot that’s telling us all the answers just sitting there, yet!įundamentally, Slack is cool and exciting but the problem that we’re solving is one with human nature and it’s going to be a tough nut to crack. And, it’s one that I enter knowing exactly what we’re going to be discussing, whom I’m going to be talking to, and that I’ll leave having accomplished what we set out to do. What does a productive meeting look like at Slack? You can watch the original version below. This is an abridged and edited transcript of the interview. We spoke to Jim Ray, Slack’s Enterprise Developer Advocate, about the transformation of internal communication and team meetings. In four years, a tool for small teams has transformed into a communication platform that has enabled a massive reduction in time-consuming team meetings with its functionality. One may say that Slack is becoming the same for team communication as Google for searching the web. Jim Ray, Slack’s Enterprise Developer Advocate, gives us some “backstage” insights into what communication looks like in a company that has transformed the way companies communicate.
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