Grace – Founder

Meet Grace. She's the Founder & CEO of Evergreen, a solar panel installation company. Grace is on a mission to increase transparency at Evergreen. She recently decided to roll out Slack to all 30 of her employees on the Standard plan. Here's how she did it.

🔍  Foster an innovative environment

Grace's primary goal was to increase communication across departments, so she configured her workspace to optimize for transparency and visibility.

1. She encouraged use of public channels.
2. She made sure information was discoverable.
3. She had leadership model open communication.

Step one 👉

Step two 👉

Step three ✅

1. She encouraged use of public channels

• To increase visibility across teams, users at Evergreen were encouraged to do as much work as possible in  public channels.
• To reduce friction, Grace chose to allow  Everyone, except guests to create new channels.

⚙  Try it out! Customize your channel management settings.

2. She made sure information was discoverable

• Grace worked with stakeholders across Evergreen to create  channel naming guidelines, ensuring information was organized and discoverable.
• Grace communicated that private channel data was wholly undiscoverable, thus making  public channels all the more important.
• When Grace needed to  deactivate users, she was happy to know that their messages and files would remain in Slack, maintaining the integrity of Evergreen's archive.  

⚙  Get started! Create channel naming guidelines for your workspace.

3. She had leadership model open communication

• Grace modeled open communication at Evergreen, sharing important updates and asking for feedback in public channels. 
• She set up an #exec-ama channel, where employees could engage directly with her leadership team in an open forum.

⚙  Engage leadership! Explore Slack for executives.

👥  Accelerate healthy adoption

Grace expected there to be some trepidation about moving from email to a more open, transparent style of communication. She proactively communicated the value of this change, and ensured users were well-supported.

1. She communicated the why, what, and how of the move to a more transparent style of communication.
2. She leveraged leaders and champions across the company.
3. She ensured users had the support they needed.

Step one 👉

Step two 👉

Step three ✅

1. She communicated the why, what, and how

• Grace sent communications to all users who would be affected by the change, explaining why the change was taking place, what they could expect, and how they could ensure minimal interruption to their work.

⚙  Get started! Craft an effective launch email.

2. She leveraged leaders and champions across the company

• She used the analytics page to identify a group of  power users, and invited them to help guide the rollout as champions.

⚙  Try it out! Explore the Analytics page for your workspace.

3. She ensured users had the support they needed

• She set up a #slack-help channel for users to ask questions. Champions are on hand to provide answers and troubleshoot.
• She created an FAQ to clarify key areas of concern for users. For example, she assured users that Slack Admins do not have visibility into DMs between users.

⚙  Get started! Create a #slack-help channel in your workspace.

🎯 Customize security settings 

While Grace's security team required visibility into where and with whom Evergreen’s data was being shared, they were committed to keeping as much power as possible in the hands of users.

1. She assigned roles strategically.
2. She built an app approval process.
3. She kept retention policies to a minimum.

Step one 👉

Step two 👉

Step three ✅

1. She assigned roles strategically

• Owners: She appointed two owners, who were responsible for both the overall administration of Slack, and the workspace's billing.
• Admins: She appointed one Admin from each business unit, who was charged with fulfilling operational tasks for their group, such as re-naming channels and inviting guests.
• Guests: Grace created a #request-guest channel, where users could request to have freelancers added to specific channels.

⚙  Try it out! Make changes to user roles.

2. She built an app approval process

• JIRA and Google Drive are core to Evergreen's tech stack, so Grace proactively  whitelisted these applications, making them available for all users to install.
• To control the installation of additional apps, Grace enabled the  Approved Apps feature, and added her security team as App Approvers to vet new requests.

⚙  Get started! Set up an app approval process.

3. She kept retention policies to a minimum

• She worked with her Infosec team to have Evergreen's retention policy lifted for data in Slack, allowing them to take full advantage of the searchable archive.
• For channels with extremely sensitive data, she set channel-specific retention policies, ensuring only data in those channels would be deleted. 
  

⚙  Get started! If required, configure a retention policy for your workspace.

🏆 Get certified 

Get Certified!
The next step is to get certified through an interactive experience in Slack. Click here to begin.