Thriving in the new normal: Freecharge leverages Slack to create stronger teams

Unarguably, one of the biggest changes to the way we work has been the acceptance of working from home (or working from anywhere, for some of us). We can't deny the advantages - this shift allowed millions of us to keep our jobs and keep the lights on. However, it came with its own baggage.

For those of us not fortunate enough to have dedicated space in the home, working from home brought on the additional stress of erasure of boundaries. We worked from home, and at home at the same time. Children interrupted meetings, dogs needed to be walked, meal prep and grocery runs needed to happen, and meetings peppered our work schedule, which now extended much further into the evening, because… well, we're working from home!

The result: burnout. We were burning the candle at both ends. Slack’s recent Leadership and the war for talent study corroborates this. Emerging from the pandemic into an increasingly volatile world, more than half (54%) of India’s knowledge workers have felt burned out in the past year. Was it the work itself? Or was it the way we worked?

When we switched to working from home, most of us worked in organisations that weren't equipped to work from home. We had to invent content management solutions on the fly. So much of our communication still lives in email, but not all of it - conversations are increasingly occurring over messaging apps and platforms, links and documents are shared during meetings in meeting chat windows, and so on. Just tracking down documents and managing version control - two tasks that normally we didn't give a second thought to, have become significant sources of stress.

Despite its ubiquity, email isn't the best form of communication for everything that happens in the office. Not only are we not co-located, but we’re also often not communicating in real-time. Conversations don't always stay threaded, even on email. Or get inter-threaded when someone mentions an aside. Who hasn't had three colleagues respond to the same email trail, sparking three different conversations? With all of this admin, how could we not feel overwhelmed?

Gone are the days when you could lean across to a co-worker's desk and ask a question or help someone with a tricky piece of code or collectively debug a sticky problem. That's not strictly true though. There are companies out there that are absolutely flourishing in this new normal, replacing the physical interactions we used to have in the office in the digital sphere, and Freecharge is one of them.

Freecharge is a financial services company backed by Axis Bank, and empowers over 27 million users to do everything from paying utility bills and recharging their phones to investing in mutual funds and buying gold—all from the convenience of their digital devices. Digital is their home turf.

Despite that, when Freecharge’s Chief Technology and Product Officer - Digital Business And Transformation (DBAT), Sanjay Jain, joined the company in December 2019, he encountered the same problems we all did - siloed information, and a near impossibility of clearly tracking past conversations.

Sanjay's answer was Slack, a collaboration hub that streamlines communications between the development, design, product, project, data science, and quality assurance teams at FreeCharge. “Our product didn’t exist in the market, so we built and scaled it. I started with three developers and my team now has 150. From day one, we used Slack.” Sanjay has plans to scale his team to 500 people in the next few years.

Slack now functions as the de facto Digital HQ for Freecharge; automating processes and enabling teams to resolve issues faster. On the #dbat-devops channel, for instance, developers share messages, workplace automation, digital tools, and files. They also ask questions, can call attention to a problem quickly, and even set up polls when needed. Moreover, Slack streamlines their workflow: previously, support emails came via email, and involved the hassle of looping in the right parties and striving to keep the conversation in one thread. There was also the chance that an email was missed altogether.

“When a developer raises a pull request, you can review and close it right in Slack,” says Principal DevOps Engineer, Yuvraj Hole. “With the Jira integration, release tickets are generated in Slack to DevOps and our QA teams.” Instead of one person on an email thread, the entire channel has full visibility and can swarm the issue. Not only does this result in faster turnaround time for customers, but it also feeds management the right intelligence to spot trends in advance.

Today, Freecharge developers spend very little time playing catch-up. “Slack has the easiest integrations with every tool on the market. It’s so powerful for any company trying to collaborate with all the right stakeholders and team members,” says Yuvraj. He loves how easy it is for a new responder to step into the conversation with customers, because they have instant access to all the history and context, without having to interrupt others. This saves a lot of time and effort. “Otherwise, you have to find a link, wait, ask someone to admit you, and explain what’s going on.”

Possibly one of the biggest challenges companies face today is in orienting newbies. It's tough enough being the new person, without the additional hurdle of not working with your colleagues face to face. According to Rahul Kotian, Principal DevOps Engineer, Freecharge, Slack plays a key role in keeping the team connected, and in generating a sense of fun.

New employees are introduced warmly and are onboarded on Slack first. “They’re introduced in the #general channel, and people will post or react with their own emoji to welcome them,” Rahul says. HR also leverages Slack to organise all the different points of access the new employees need while maintaining a high level of security. This gives the newcomer visibility into who is looking into which aspect of their onboarding process, and allows for easier follow-up, if need be.

Of course, as Slack maintains the history of any channel they're in, newbies find it easier to hit the ground running when they don't have to play catch-up on conversations by asking what they might consider basic questions. Team leaders and supervisors can also mentor these newcomers more easily through the many collaboration features of Slack - a quick huddle, for instance, is much faster and more thorough than a long-drawn out conversation.

Knowledge workers are the backbone of India's startup ecosystem, as well as the burgeoning IT and ITES industry. Relieving their burnout should be front and centre for any company aiming for growth. Almost a quarter (24%) of knowledge workers who said their leaders do not communicate well also said they were dissatisfied with their jobs - four times the rate of respondents whose leaders are good at communicating, where the proportion is just 6%.

This is good news, as it means that organisations do have a stronger measure of control over attrition than previously thought. Communication can be an easy fix for companies that already have an open communication culture but are hampered by the wrong tools and processes. For the rest, it's time for some introspection and some real talk.