The Slack Status Takeover

I have to share something hilarious that I’ve been doing at work.

My company uses Slack to communicate which I am sure most people are familiar with. On Slack you can set custom statuses in addition to marking yourself active or away, and it’s this feature that I’ve been taking advantage of. Because I do not have many meetings during the day that I need to attend my status is rarely marked as “In a Meeting” so I’ve felt like it’s pretty under-utilized. Thus, I have begun changing my statuses each day to different funny quips or sayings that have been an absolute game changer in getting to know people at work.

For example, on the third day that I decided to do this, I put my status in the morning as a stack of pancakes for the emoji and wrote “Craving some pancakes right now…” At lunchtime I put a frying pan with the status “Making some pancakes!” And, in the afternoon, I changed it to a yum face emoji with the status “The pancakes were delicious and I should’ve made more…” This got my teammates to mention me in our common shared channel about how funny they found my statuses to be and looked forward to me doing more of them. To quote one coworker, “the level of courtesy to at least let us know the pancakes were good — top tier!” It even got me compliments in our all-team meeting on Saturday by four different coworkers and had me smiling so much. I definitely earned some serious brownie points that day with everyone.

Tomorrow’s status will be this bit.ly link, and I am so excited to see the reactions from my coworkers when they view it…