Revitalizing Internal Communications: a Fresh Approach Using Slack Profiles

This article the entry for day 9 in the 2024 KINTO Technologies Advent Calendar🎅🎄

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KINTO Technologies is an engineer-driven organization with a team of over 300 members. In an increasingly complex business environment, we continuously seek to balance organizational efficiency and creativity. With dispersed locations and increase in remote work, cross-departmental communication has become more limited, making it essential to address this challenge seriously.

This article, written by Nakanishi from the Development Relations Group, discusses the first step in revitalizing the organization by using Slack, our primary tool for daily communication and how we're building a talent search system based on Slack.

Talent search is a system that allows you to search for data on employees' skills.

Why Is Talent Search Needed?

While working efficiently is important, innovation often comes from unexpected encounters, and even seemingly mundane conversations can play a crucial role In our organization, the intense focus on daily tasks we often tend to overlook “tacit knowledge” and “latent potential”.

For example, even if you think, "Is there anyone with this skill?", you don't know who to consult. As our organization grows, this information asymmetry has become a serious challenge. To tackle this challenge directly, we decided to strategically utilize Slack profiles and take a proactive approach.

Benefits of Utilizing Slack Profiles

From the Perspective of the Developer Relations (DevRel) Group

1. Discovering previously unnoticed talent
   There are many individuals whose talents and potential remain unnoticed within the organization. Although members of the Technical PR Group communicate with employees daily, it is still challenging to fully understand everyone. Slack profiles serve as a new tool to make these "hidden talents" visible.

2. Accelerating project support
   We hope that being able to quickly identify people with the right skills will dramatically improve the speed of project launch and problem solving Until now, finding someone with a specific skill often relied on word-of-mouth searches within the company. However, establishing a network that enables direct communication without relying on hub organizations like us is essential for the organization's future growth.

3. Promoting cross-departmental collaboration
   Until now, the Technical PR Group has organized various initiatives, such as in-house study sessions, exchange events, and study sessions inviting external lecturers. As a result, natural communication has emerged within the company, creating a chain reaction where initial connections lead to an expanding network, new collaborations are established every day. This Slack initiative will surely spur this trend.

Benefits for All Employees

• Expanding opportunities for career growth
  Clearly expressing your skills and interests opens up new possibilities that you may not have noticed before. By connecting with keywords that you may not have thought of yourself, various opportunities emerge at a grassroots level. This goes beyond just work, creating opportunities for individuals with shared challenges to learn from each other and grow together.

• Quick access to skilled colleagues
  Specifically, when a new employee is looking for a frontend engineer with expertise in Next.js, they can quickly and easily search in Slack, which makes learning and problem-solving much more efficient. An internal talent database will be built and made searchable as an extension of searching messages on Slack.

• Revitalizing natural internal interactions
  There are also grassroots activities for various hobbies within the company. Whether or not they can be called as hobbies, there are interest-based channels ranging from back health to sharing easy-to-make recipes. There are also channels for various sports, games, and, of course, new technologies. As individuals become more easily connected to these channels, non-work-related interactions grow, fostering smoother collaboration in urgent work situations through pre-existing relationships.

A System to Support Profile Creation

For those who feel unsure about what to write, the Technical PR Group is actively providing support. This approach is more than just gathering information, it is a thoughtful dialogue process designed to unlock each employee's potential.

Since the launch of our Tech Blog, we have conducted interviews to highlight employees' talents, provided support in writing articles and preparing presentation materials, and organized events and study sessions. If you are reading this article and have not yet complete your Slack profile, or if you are unsure what to include, please reach out. Let's work together to discover your strengths and share them within the organization!

Support includes:

1. Uncovering experience and interest through individual interviews
   One-on-one conversations help discover potential strengths that even the individual may not be aware of.

2. Templates for creating profiles
   Even if you are not good at expressing yourself, you can fill it out with confidence.

3. Assistance in verbalization for those who find self-expression difficult
   Specialized staff offer close support to help individuals appropriately express their strengths and interests.

Template:

Search results

Future Prospects

Currently, talent search is conducted manually, but in the future, we aim to develop a skill matching system using AI. By effectively utilizing accumulated data, we envision a more efficient and strategic approach to human resource management. Looking ahead, this will enable a deeper understanding of each employee's potential and link them with the best opportunities.

Conclusion

The Slack profile is more than just a self-introduction. It is a strategic tool that unlocks an organization's hidden potential by connecting people and is the key to unleashing individual possibilities.

By actively sharing your interests, skills, and potential, the possibilities of the entire organization can be expanded. We believe that this small step will eventually lead to a significant transformation.