Slack Analytics

I recently discovered that Slack has an analytics page. We’ve been using Slack for around 1 year now, and the statistics sure were interesting.

The channel with the most posts is the team that were responsible for the adoption of using Slack. They collectively have written 74,000 posts in that one channel. That figure is seriously alarming. What about posting in other channels, or sending private messages? Damn.

Well, their highest individual posted 64,000 messages, but the average for their team was around 30,000. Their newest member of their team led the monthly charts for December with 3,500 across the 18 days she was in the office.

I think I use Slack far too much, but I have 1,700 message for the entire year. Yet, that is half the leading December poster. My team’s channel has around 1,100 posts. So we post around 74 times less than the highest posting team. That particular team has posted 2.5 times the second place team, so they are ahead by some distance.

I do wonder how much Slack impacts productivity. I think the team that is leading the Slack charts is perceived to be very productive and innovative by the Managers. Yet perception by Managers is often different from the actual truth. I often hear their team claim they are too busy and that other teams need to help out with their backlog. Maybe if they weren’t on Slack so much, then more work would be done? I don’t see how one team can justify sending 74,000 messages across a year. That is a staggering amount.