#wins: How to Connect Every Single Employee to Every Company Victory

October 20, 2016

Editor’s Note: This article was originally posted on LinkedIn. You can read it here.

There is no question that Slack is one of the fastest-growing SaaS applications in terms of adoption. It’s been spreading like wildfire for the last 18 months or so. But it’s always been a pretty heavily debated topic: Does Slack help or hurt productivity and collaboration? (See: Slack, I’m Breaking Up with You)

Like a lot of other businesses, we were faced with a decision about eight months ago: Let Slack continue on as shadow IT with multiple different instances being used, or buy it for the whole company and make it one of our sanctioned applications? We decided on the latter. (For more info on how we implemented it, check out our article: Here’s How We Took Advantage of Shadow IT and Rolled Out Slack).

I was pretty hot and cold on Slack for the first six months. I could see that everyone in the organization had adopted it, but I could also see that it was a distraction for part of our team. Unlike most organizations, we didn’t just let our instance of Slack grow and operate organically. Our IT team spent (and still spends) time cutting down channels that aren’t used, merging duplicate channels, training new people on how to use Slack correctly, adding bots to do lookups for different parts of the organizations, etc.

We started to see progress, but the real breakthrough moment was when we made the decision to create our #wins channel.

#wins is a channel that is broadcast only. There is no back and forth conversation among employees, and it’s almost 100% automated (the only exception is that people can give anonymous shoutouts to others). Its purpose is to share wins–small and large–that are happening around our organization. This includes successes like:

Bringing a new customer on board:

customer win

Customers leaving positive reviews about our support team:

customer reviews

New people joining the company:

new employees

Feedback about a new product release:

product release

and much more (mentions in the news, product releases, etc). The channel is connected to Zendesk, SFDC, JIRA and a number of custom scripts.

What happened is that suddenly everyone at BetterCloud could celebrate the small wins that they’d normally never hear about. Everyone had equal opportunity (and timing). In general we’ll have between 5-10 automated #wins posts come through every day, and people will respond with emojis but nothing else.

If new people join the company, they can scroll through all the wins we’ve ever posted. If someone goes on vacation, they can get caught up on wins that occurred while they were away. The sales, customer success, support, and marketing teams know as soon as a release goes into production. Likewise, engineering, QA, and product know as soon as we have a big customer win.

For years I’ve been trying to figure out how to communicate across the company in a way where everyone can feel the momentum, where exciting news doesn’t have to be manually communicated by me, and where we’re not relying on email as the communication method. The problem with email is that you may feel like certain things are too insignificant or trivial to share via email. But with the #wins channel, everyone is encouraged to share their own successes, large or small.

Since we adopted Slack, cross-team communication gaps have decreased by 12% (according to our biannual internal company survey). We’ve rolled out other initiatives to improve communication as well, but Slack has certainly been a substantial factor. Plus, the #wins channel helps maintain momentum between major milestones, which is something I imagine all leaders strive for. Our big milestones are exciting, but they’re also spread out. We constantly remind everyone that this is a marathon, not a sprint, and the #wins channel helps reinforce that message.

From this point on, no matter what happens, I can’t see ever replacing Slack–not because of the chat capabilities, but because of this single public channel that was made possible by Slack’s open platform and their integrations. It’s turned out to be an amazing mode of communication that is far more effective than email for sharing successes and wins.

Founder & CEO

David Politis is the Founder and CEO of <a href="https://www.bettercloud.com/">BetterCloud</a> where he oversees the day to day activities of the company and is responsible for the overall product vision and business strategy. As a pioneer in the cloud services industry, David has vast experience launching and building high growth SaaS companies and an immense passion for enterprise cloud technology.