User groups in Slack

What is user groups?

A user group is a group of members in a workspace who often need to be notified at once. You can mention a groups unique name - for example @success, @support-team to notify every member of that team. We have added every member of our different teams in each user group.

Why is it smart to use user groups?

Since we have a very collaborative and dynamic work environment, user groups helps us in several ways. Here are some key benefits:

Efficient communication

User groups allow you to streamline communication by organizing individuals with similar roles, responsibilities, or projects into specific groups. This helps in targeting messages to relevant stakeholders, reducing noise, and improving overall communication efficiency.

Focused Collaboration

User groups enable targeted collaboration among team members who share common objectives or tasks. This helps us to achieve a focused environment for discussing specific projects, initiatives, or topics, enhancing productivity and outcomes.

Ease of Notification

When you need to communicate with a particular group of people, using a user group ensures that everyone in that group receives the message. This ensures timely notifications and reduces the chances of important information being missed.

Include stakeholders

User groups can help in including all relevant stakeholders in discussions, ensuring that diverse perspectives are considered. This promotes inclusivity and collaboration across different functions and teams.

Reduced the feeling of being overwhelmed

In large teams or organizations, it's easy for individuals to get overwhelmed by a constant stream of messages. User groups help in managing this by allowing people to focus on the discussions that directly relate to their work.

Simplified Mentions and Tags

Tagging a user group is often more efficient than individually mentioning each member of the group. It simplifies the process of directing a message to a larger audience without the need for repetitive mentions.

Scalability

As teams grow or projects expand, user groups can easily adapt to include new team members or stakeholders, providing a scalable communication and collaboration solution.

In summary, user groups in Slack provide a structured and efficient way to manage communication, foster collaboration, enhance privacy, and ensure relevant information reaches the right people. This can significantly contribute to improved productivity and a more effective workflow within an organization.

How will it be used?

In our case, user groups will be used to notify and include different teams in Slack. It will help us by not relying on one person being available to respond, but rather relying on an entire team to get the message.

Example 1: If an update in the channel #changelog is relevant to the sales team, we can easily notify all of the team members by using the @sales-team tag. Example post where this would be helpful: https://mystore.slack.com/archives/C02GDBADC/p1695372154861489

Example 2: We need a DevOps to do a backup of a merchant. Then we can easily use the @devops tag to notify our DevOps team, and the one who´s available to help you gets a notification.

Which tags do we have?

The following tags are available to use (the names are quite self-explanatory). We have more groups, but the ones below are the most important for you to know about.

In Slack, you can navigate to More > People & User Groups to view all the different groups and their members.

Contact a Slack admin if you need to add/remove members.