30 Jun
APS Embrace Slack during Covid-19
APS took the strategic decision to embrace Slack at the start of 2020, the collaboration capability of Slack was the key driver for the adoption. But with the global coronavirus situation, it really was a catalyst for APS to fully utilise Slack across our organisation.
Slack has become our one stop shop where we get most of our work done. We’ve added our key applications all of which are integrated with Slack such as Outlook, Workstreams (for task tracking), Zoom, Google Docs, HubSpot CRM, Dropbox, OneDrive and project insight. These are all supporting our remote working and collaboration activities, and we continually adjust our use of these tools to improve our operating efficiency.
Now that we don’t see each other daily we’ve instituted a senior team daily stand up using Slack and Workstreams which enables us to touch base, keep track of our tasks and goals items and agree backlog items to move forward. Beyond the management team, APS are using slack to open up all our communications to our on staff consultants and have shared channels for our associate network and software partners. This allows us to provide regular updates and communications across our organisation and creates a spirit of transparency and the feel of being one team.
To support Slack adoption across our consultants, APS ran a competition and the person with the most interaction across the platform won a hamper. We also use the channel to celebrate success and build on one of our values “Access to a network of great people within the APS eco system, who offer diverse skills, experience and products”
Our email traffic has reduced by circa 75% internally across APS from using Slack, increasing the speed of our decision making as the right people have access to right information at the right time.
Ed Bearcroft (CDIO) commented “Having used Slack at my previous organisation, I could see the immediate benefits this would bring to APS. We are seeing a lot of interest in how fund managers can enhance their business process off the back of Man Group deploying Slack across their entire employee base (https://slackhq.com/man-group-fully-remote-slack) . Our vision at APS is to enable our clients to realise their business ambitions by providing superior solutions supported by excellent products. This is achieved by understanding the problems, providing the best people and products whilst working in partnership to deliver clients’ business goals and Slack has become a great part of that journey”