Slack: Yea or Nay?
By Next Level Pod on June 15th, 2022 in Uncategorized
There is one business tool that your hosts here at Law Firm Next just don’t agree on. What is it? Slack.
Slack is a communication tool used by many online businesses. It can act as a replacement for email in that you organize your team into groups and send quick messages to multiple people at once.
For some, it helps keep communication streamlined and organized. For others, it just doesn’t get the job done.
Mark fits into the former group and is pro-Slack while Melanie fits into the latter and doesn’t love Slack. Let’s break down why on each side.
Why Mark Loves Slack
Mark and his team started using Slack because they needed a solution for all the issues they were having with email as their team was growing. When you’re using email for all of your communication with your team, there’s always an issue of some sort cluttering up the inbox.
Additionally, somebody always ends up getting dropped off along the way. That person doesn’t know what’s going on and is stuck waiting for an answer.
When Slack came out, Mark was early to jump on the train of replacing internal email. With Slack, you can organize people into groups and create different folders for all of the different topics within your business. All of this information is organized in a central and consistent way, accessible to whomever you want to include in the channel. As new people come on the channel, they have access to the entire history and searchability of those channels as well.
Why Melanie Does Not Love Slack
Like Mark, Melanie is not a big fan of email. However, she doesn’t think it makes sense to move everything from email over to Slack. She doesn’t think it makes her team any more proactive; they’re just reacting to another channel.
On top of that, instead of just having the one channel of email, now you have two different channels to keep track of: email and Slack.
Melanie would much prefer using a workflow tool or practice management feature. She likes all information to be held in a software like this. You can find it at the time you need it, not in advance when you need to remember it or save it for later.
Melanie also prefers holding meetings with her team. For example, when training a new team member, if they have a quick question, she would rather them ask their 10 quick questions during a 20-minute phone call with her than be interrupted 10 times a day with their questions. She has regular meetings with her team members where they cover questions like this.
Mark’s opinion on this is that people work at different times. Getting people together for meetings is sometimes impossible. Being able to use Slack anywhere, everywhere, and for everything is his main goal.
If you want to learn more about Slack and the arguments on each side, check out Episode 046: The Great Slack Debate.