“We are spread over 41 offices in 32 countries. In the Middle East & Africa region alone that I manage, we are in 4 countries with 4 separate offices, Riyadh, Dubai, Casablanca and Johannesburg. We therefore need collaborative tools to be able to interact with each other to remain as responsive as possible. We’ve been using Slack for over 5 years. It allows us to have a tool with channels by business, by brand, by country, by operational group (salesperson, customer service, STA, etc.). Slack is also used for conversations between people and in small groups.
On the social side, we use Workplace by Facebook for large organizations. Workplace allows us to post photos, and of course visuals for marketing, HR messages and anything else employees want to share with our 1,300 fellow employees around the world.
When addiction awaits us
We use it daily and to speak only of our region, employees start each morning by saying hello on Slack and then start posting, especially the dirty meetings they do, in order to share things already made for international brands or in the same sector of activity. This is what allows us to be responsive to our customers. How does it change the way we work? Responsiveness, no more planning to make a call to talk about a client, an employee is thinking of something, regardless of their job in the company, they can directly share it on Slack and someone in the world will be able to react and give feedback within 24 hours. It is very powerful in terms of business.
Finally, on the Workplace side, very easily, we can take ideas from other countries on customer marketing events or even group outings, internal competitions! It is also good to introduce your country, your region to other employees from other countries.
That being said, the biggest drawback remains addiction. We get up in the morning, we start by checking our emails then go to Slack to find out what happened on the other side. The time difference between different countries allows us to wake up knowing exactly what other people have done in their morning… so we become addicted very easily”.