How Slack Has Helped Keep Our Culture Alive

Anyone who knows Nebo, knows our culture is everyone’s #1 favorite thing about our company. Or maybe it’s just my favorite thing because I’m on the culture team and volunteer for every single event ever (think: Neboween, Pi Day, Chili Cookoffs, etc.), and I’m biased. Either way, our culture is important to us, and going remote way back in March 2020 (102398029384 days ago, not that I’m counting) seriously threw a wrench in our togetherness plans. 

Enter: Slack. 

Slack has always played a pretty big role in Nebo’s culture. At posting time, we have 341 public channels, ranging from client-specific work-only channels, to the standard built-ins like #general and #random, to the purely entertaining #memes and #musicals. We even have specific rules in Slack, like: 

And

So prior to our WFH confinement, we were already pretty good at using Slack, but our usage has blown up tenfold lately. 

As I said, we have a lot of different Slack channels to keep us occupied (and thoroughly distracted) throughout the day. Fan favorites include: 

#aww, the most feel-good channel of them all, chock full of pics of people’s puppies, babies, and other cute things that make your heart melt.

#gals, a channel for everyone who identifies as a gal to chat about empowerment and equality. And maybe also about makeup, real clothes, and how we’re never wearing any of those things ever again. 

#crazycats, where the cat people have been banished, because apparently no one wants to see cat pictures in other channels (not that I’m salty). #crazycats also has a really fun bot that spews Cat Facts every so often, so not only are we loving our feline friends, we’re also learning.

#memes for some good laughs, #diy to share the hobbies you’ve picked up in the last who-knows-how-many months, #veggie for vegans and vegetarians alike to make fun of themselves and share recipes, and #tv-talks to discuss new episodes of whatever show just went viral (remember Tiger King?). Except for chatter about the new episodes of the Bachelorette, which belongs in #bachbetches.

But our newest and most active channel has been #nebo-holidays-2020. The virtual embodiment of our in-office culture. The hub of all things Nebo. The center of—well, you get the picture. This channel hosts our daily holiday-themed Zoom background drops, random polls, photos of our at-home holiday decorations, and our very popular and competitive bracket games. We’ve had brackets ranging from Best Disney Movie/Song/Princess, to Favorite October Movie, and now we’re in the middle of Best Thanksgiving Food. Stay tuned for a winner, because it’s getting heated. 

From Neboween:

To Thanksgiving:

And preparing for Christmas:

But it’s not just the different channels that make Slack the happy little haven that it is. It’s everything we do in them. With 40+ custom Slackbot responses, 523 custom emojis (14 of which are a variation of party parrot, and at least 100 are office dogs), and a dozen Slack App integrations (shoutout to Giphy and SimplePoll), we’ve made Slack as Nebo as it gets. It’s almost like being in the office together. 

Almost.