According to Slack’s customer data, there are now over 100,000 organizations around the world that use their asynchronous communication and collaboration software. By 2025, Slack is expected to have more than 47 million people using the platform to connect with their remote teams, drive productivity, and send out company-wide announcements
If you’re in HR and your organization is joining the millions of people moving to Slack from emails or Microsoft tools, or you’ve just been delegated the task of announcing monthly wellness initiatives, the thought of writing your first Slack announcement might feel a little overwhelming.
The messaging format is different from other work communication tools. By nature, it’s a fast and casual platform, so you can take off your formal HR comms hat, put on your creative hat, and make full use of emojis and gifs to help drive engagement for your wellness announcements.
In this article, we’re looking at best practices for HR Slack announcements, how to go about crafting engaging Slack posts, and some Slack announcement templates.
Increasing employee engagement through Slack
Thanks to its ease of use and versatility, Slack was a huge hit from the moment it launched. It made life much simpler for remote teams to connect, communicate, and collaborate — and it radically reduced the number of meetings and email threads that employees had to deal with every day.
It’s estimated that employees now spend an average of 9 hours logged into Slack every work day, so it’s the perfect place to launch your HR announcements and ensure that everyone can see and respond to them.
If you’re new to Slack, you’re joining organizations that are reporting the following benefits:
- Improved team dynamics
- Increased employee engagement and connection
- Keeps everyone in the loop about new initiatives, no matter their time zone or location
- Eliminates messy email threads
- Promotes a modern, inclusive work culture
- Makes communicating faster, simpler, and more fun for teams
- Supports HR in effectively launching and managing new programs
Related: How to Be an Effective HR Manager for a Remote Team
How to set up and manage an announcement channel
When you’re launching your new wellness channel, make sure it aligns with Slack’s best practices for remote teams.
In a big, busy organization, Slack chatter can drown out important announcements. So you’ll need to manage your wellness channel effectively, and make sure each post is seen and actioned.
To start, you should create a new channel that’s specifically about wellness. Don’t just drop your announcements into #general or #random where they might get lost in the flow of daily chatter, memes, and work-related questions.
We recommend setting up your wellness program in a dedicated Slack announcement channel. This is key to keeping your wellness conversations on topic, and making sure your announcements can be easily found and searched for. If you set up a dedicated announcement channel, this might look like #announcements-wellness.
Announcement channels let you set and manage posting permissions, which means you can keep this space clear for important HR updates.
Naming your new channel
We suggest keeping things simple when it comes to naming conventions. Here are some popular channel names for inspiration:
#wellness
#wellness-wednesday
#well-being
#well-being-and-self-care
#wellness-well-being-self-care
#health-and-wellness
Pro tip: If your channel has a relevant name, this will make it easy to find when employees are searching for it.
Channel names like #your-best-you and #practicing-healthy-habits may be fun and descriptive, but they’re not names that most people would think to search for.
How to write the channel topic and description
Setting the topic
The channel topic is something that will appear in the header section, next to the channel name. This will help give some context to what the channel is about, or highlight a specific goal for the channel.
Suggested topic ideas include;
- All things health and well-being related
- Chat about wellness and participate in well-being activities here!
- Our space for health and well-being
- Wellness challenges, events and chatter
Setting the description
This section adds more information about the purpose of the channel and how to use it.
An example description for your wellness channel could be:
“Join this channel to discuss well-being topics related to physical and mental health, nutrition, financial well-being, self-care and more. Learn about and ask questions about wellness challenges, events and anything else <your org> x wellness related!”
Unlike channel names, you CAN add emojis to your channel topic and descriptions. However, the options to add emojis don’t appear when you’re typing, so you’ll need to copy and paste them in.
Head to emojipedia.org to find the emojis you’re looking for, copy the code, and voila — emojis!
Once your channel is set up, send a company-wide announcement (in Slack or by email) letting everyone know there’s a new wellness channel to check out. Make sure all employees join this channel so you can maximize engagement and ensure everyone is kept in the loop when you post something new.
Be mindful when you’re sending posts
When you’re sending out wellness posts to your remote teams, you’ll need to think about the timing and cadence of these. For example, will you:
- Pre-schedule your messages?
- Set an @channel alert so the entire channel gets notified at once, no matter which time zone they’re in?
- Only alert people who are actively online when you post?
Remember that some people might forget to mark themselves as offline after work, or forget to turn off their mobile notifications. So if they get pinged at 3am by your enthusiastic wellness post, they may not be quite as enthusiastic about it as you are.
You also want to avoid sending announcements at busy or stressful times for your teams, such as Friday afternoons, when engagement levels will be lower.
Creating workflows and automations
If you want to automate announcements, create workflows, or schedule new posts to launch in prime work hours for your employees, there are plenty of options available in Slack and with third-party apps to help streamline your processes.
Related: How to Implement Wellness Program at Work
Crafting effective Slack messaging for wellness initiatives
The vibe of Slack tends to be “posts that you could let your kids and parents read”. So avoid buttoned-up corporate messaging and think more “TikTok” than “LinkedIn” when you’re writing announcements.
Designing and formatting announcement posts
Formatting your wellness messages will help you create templates and optimize them over time once you find out which styles drive the most engagement at your organization.
Slack lets you create text formats like bold, strikethrough, and indent, create ordered or unordered lists, and add block quotes to keep things visually interesting for employees.
Prioritize creating short, snappy posts that have:
- A casual greeting, such as “Hey everyone!”
- Short sentences
- Simple language for readability and comprehension
- Bullet points to break up big walls of text and keep your post skimmable
- Emojis. You can download hundreds of Slack-ready emojis to spice up your wellness posts. Or you can create your own!
- Gifs. You can easily add Giphy to Slack so you have relevant wellness gifs at your fingertips whenever you need them.
Your messages should be lighthearted and attention-grabbing, and designed for a fast and easy read. And it goes without saying that they should be clearly focused on wellness initiatives.
If you’re new to posting in Slack, avoid the rookie mistake of signing off a post with your name! People will be able to easily see that you’re the message creator, and they’ll see your thumbnail profile photo as well.
Don’t make your posts seem like work
It’s important that you don’t make your wellbeing announcements, challenges, and other opportunities for engagement feel like work, because employees will need to take these posts into account outside their normal daily tasks. If your posts are dull and feel like “just another chore” for employees, engagement levels will be low.
Effective wellness announcements will get your remote employees interested and motivated to engage with them. Ask people to react or comment on your announcement by including a CTA (call to action) at the end of each post. You can see some examples of great CTAs below.
How Bright Breaks can help you with writing effective HR updates on Slack (+ examples)
Every week we release a fresh script that HR teams can use to promote common wellness themes, and time sensitive ones, to their teams.
Our Slack-optimized resources help you quickly create and send effective Slack messages to employees, reducing your admin time and ensuring high engagement levels for your announcement posts. Plus, you’ll never be stuck for fresh content.
Check out some of our Slack resources below:
Monthly Canva Template Example
🧔🏽🚹 November is Men’s Health Awareness Month!
November is also known as “Movember,” a month to raise awareness about men’s health issues, including prostate and testicular cancer. 💙
Most of you have likely heard of Movember, the month where men are encouraged to grow mustaches to generate awareness of the cause and raise donations. You may see more mustaches than usual this month for this exact reason!
👉🏾 For more information or to learn how to participate visit movember.com
✅ Are you participating in Movember or know someone who is? Let us know in the comments!
✋🏼⏸️ How are your work-life balance boundaries?
Boundaries are important for our well-being – especially in a remote setting. Let’s explore this in the spirit of Remote Worker Wellness Month!
If you don’t have healthy boundaries in place, you could feel drained and on the road to burnout. No one wants that!
Here’s examples of healthy boundaries to set:
- ⏰Establish regular working hours
- 🌮Take regular breaks. Did you know 3 out of 10 of us skip lunch? Take quick strolls, time to eat, and a few minutes to stretch!
- 📵Turn off work notifications when you’re taking time away
- 🏝️Use your vacation time and fully disconnect to recharge
What else did we miss that’s important for work-life balance? Let us know in the comments below 👇
If your HR team would love to get our weekly email with fresh Slack resources every Friday, you can subscribe to our weekly wellness scripts here ⬇️
How to track and improve engagement on your Slack announcements
Slack is like a virtual water cooler, and a great wellness post will encourage chat between your remote employees and give them an additional opportunity to connect.
For this reason, you can simply use Slack activity in your wellness channel to measure the effectiveness of your posts. Lots of likes, emojis, and comments means you’re doing great!
If your wellness announcement is promoting an online event, you can also track how many people show up to your event. If you have 150 people in your team, and only 5 show up to your online event, you might need to optimize your future posts and timing cadences to boost engagement levels.
Depending on your plan, you can also use the Slack analytics dashboard to understand more about the engagement levels of messages, channels, and members in your workspace over time.
Wrapping up
We hope this article has given you a few great tips on creating impactful HR announcements on Slack, and how you can start using Slack for your employee wellness initiatives.
Of course, if you feel your employees are spending a little too much time on Slack — they can integrate seven-minute Bright Breaks into their day to unwind and connect with co-workers. This will help your teams stay more productive throughout the day and give them a chance to stretch, refresh, and refocus whenever they need it.
