IT Automation with Slack: Onboarding and Channel Maintenance

Every day, more companies are adopting “work from anywhere” policies to attract and retain talent. Many of these companies—including 80% of the Fortune 100— now leverage Slack to enable real-time collaboration from anywhere. With over 18 million daily active users sending over 1.5 billion messages every week, it has clearly become part of a core tech stack driving the modern workplace.

With usage stats like that, there is a pretty good chance that if you are in IT, your team is administering Slack. Given how much the platform can do—from chat to file sharing to video calls—Slack-related requests can end up generating a lot of tickets.  

Employees are also spending a ton of time on Slack. Every work day, they are connected for an average of nine hours, spending 90 minutes of that actively using the app. This means that even low-priority Slack maintenance tasks, like cleaning up inactive channels or making sure everyone’s role is visible and up to date, can have an outsize impact on employee experience.

When you integrate Slack with a SaaS management platform like BetterCloud, there is a lot you can automate. In this first part of our series on IT automation with Slack, we’ll take a look at three easy workflows anyone on your team can create.

#1. Automatically create a Slack account for new hires

When a new hire starts, Slack will be one of many new accounts IT needs to create. Just populating all the profile fields for every new employee, including first name, last name, username, email, job title, and more, can take awhile. It’s also pretty easy to make a mistake, especially if you are onboarding a lot of new hires at once.

With BetterCloud, you can do this in a single step as part of an automated onboarding workflow. You can automatically pull in data from your source of truth to prepopulate a new profile, reducing the risk of typos or other errors. In seconds, a new hire has a shiny new, pre-populated Slack account, and IT didn’t have to lift a finger. All the new employee has to do is pick their favorite headshot for their profile. 

#2. Automatically add employees to Slack channels

After your workflow creates an account for a new hire, you can add a couple more steps to automatically add them to relevant Slack channels. This really helps new hires feel more connected and “in the know” on day one, instead of waiting to be added to channels ad hoc by a manager or co-worker.

You can even set up workflows that add new employees to different channels depending on their department or location. For example, let’s say your new employee will be in sales. You can create a workflow that checks to see if they will be in the sales department, and adds them to sales-specific channels automatically.

#3. Clean up unused Slack channels

Slack channels all get started with the best of intentions. Most start off with high engagement, connecting employees with shared interests or providing a dedicated space for project collaboration. However, it’s easy for those channels to become less active as employee interests and business needs change. When employees are no longer engaging in a channel, it just ends up cluttering up everyone’s Slack interface. 

An easy way to tackle this is by setting an alert and creating an alert-based automated workflow. With BetterCloud, you can set an alert to let IT know when a public channel has no more members. Then, you can set an alert-based workflow to archive that channel automatically. You can also be notified when new public channels are created, to gain greater visibility and control over your company’s Slack experience.

With these alerts and workflows in place, your IT team can stay focused on high priority tasks while ensuring a better user experience on your company’s Slack.

To see how easy it is to automate with BetterCloud and Slack, check out the video below.

These three examples are just a fraction of the many use cases you can automate with BetterCloud and Slack. Stay tuned for part two of our series on IT automation with Slack, where we dive into three more use cases that not only save time, but improve your security posture as well.

If you would like to learn how to get your IT team automating with Slack, schedule a demo today.