Did You See The Vested Group in the Wall Street Journal?

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Integrating Slack into your business may seem like a huge burden, but with the proper onboarding and guidelines, it can be a great tool to collaborate throughout your organization.

Here at The Vested Group, we saw how distracting Slack could be, resulting in non-believers and a decrease in utilization in our employees. Because of this, we decided to create what we like to call the "Slack Playbook" - a guideline to using Slack in the workplace and making it a true collaboration station.

Recently, The Vested Group's Founder, Joel Patterson, was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal to discuss how we use Slack in the workplace without it becoming a distraction...

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At The Vested Group, a technology-consulting firm in Plano, Texas, founder Joel Patterson realized he had a problem with Slack soon after employees started using it. The constant flow of Slack messages and notifications were so distracting that some employees refused to use it, while others had trouble disengaging from it to focus on work.

Like social media, Slack can become addicting, says Lucas Miller, a productivity researcher and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

“It’s obviously helpful to be able to communicate in real time,” he says. “It’s also another distraction. It makes it very difficult for people to focus at work, because there’s always a possibility that there’s something urgent or something that you may be missing.”

To solve these problems, The Vested Group developed a dedicated training session on Slack best practices and made it part of its new-employee orientation. The company also created a Slack etiquette guide that explains, among other things, how and when to silence notifications so users can focus on work. As employees learned how to use Slack, the resisters were able to see its benefits, Mr. Patterson says.

“There are people that just don’t like it, they don’t really understand using it and they’d rather go over and just talk to somebody,” Mr. Patterson says. “The problem is, as your company continues to use it more and more, those people are missing out on things that are important.”

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Looking for tips on how to keep Slack from being too noisy in your workplace? Here are a few links to get you started:

Article written by Charity L. Scott for the Wall Street Journal.

Did You See The Vested Group in the Wall Street Journal?

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