Slack can be your company’s love language
Building a remote work culture that actually feels human
CHERRY ON TOP 🍒 is our monthly newsletter exploring the ins and outs of everything that modern businesses need to truly shine. We dive into topics that live at the intersection of our two companies – ORCHARD STREET, a venture studio + angel fund & DALY, a comms+ agency – as both help founders get the best ideas out into the world, through outstanding operations, comms, and culture-building.Ally: Slack tends to get a lot of…flack.
Over the years, there have been countless stories about how Slack increases distractions and reduces productivity – in addition to being a halfhearted proxy for real in-person collaboration.
But workplaces have always had distractions. The concept of watercooler conversation is built into the fabric of the modern workplace, and often the best team-building and bonding happens in those moments of silly non-work-related chatter.
To me, the circling debate around the benefits of return to office vs remote work is actually a conversation about whether the collaborative and social benefits of IRL workplace interactions can be effectively replicated digitally.
And I’m here to say: they can – if you can create a proper framework for how your remote team uses Slack. (Editors’ note: this issue is *not* a Slack ad, and you can mentally replace “Slack” with your workplace comms tool of choice 😉).
Collaborating on Slack is easy. Recreating the quick, casual desk chats and inherent social spaces of an office? Much trickier. But when balanced with deep, focused work, those spontaneous brain breaks are crucial to building a healthy, collaborative, and truly productive team.
It’s achievable, we promise. Over to Alex to share a glimpse into Daly’s own Slack culture, and how we’ve managed to create a remote work environment that feels like a true digital proxy for IRL office culture.
Alex: By the time March 2020 came around, we had just gotten settled into our beautiful Soho office space (it was covered in a design blog, y’all!) with a 2-year lease ahead of us.
While we did our best to maintain our company culture when the world shut down and we bid the office farewell, it was a trial by fire. So, when we began to rebuild Daly in 2021 – essentially from scratch, with a new commitment to remaining fully remote – we leaned on two of our company values, intimacy & transparency, to build a remote culture that could last. And that started with Slack.
Building our very own cozy space
At Daly, Slack is more than just a place to exchange updates and drop the occasional thumbs up emoji – it’s the heartbeat of our remote team. And that has been highly intentional from the beginning.
Too often, Slack and other workplace comms tools are purely transactional: a place for delegating tasks, quick asks, “circling back,” and often lots of radio silence. If you want a remote work culture to thrive, your internal comms has to feel less like an endless to-do list and more like a convivial dinner party – that means carving out space for casual, cozy, and unstructured conversation.
A big part of this is active, fun participation. On Daly’s Slack, joining in on conversations beyond work projects is highly encouraged, and even expected. Whether it’s reacting to an excellent article a teammate landed in the #clips channel or tossing in a quick, silly response to someone’s (random) thoughts in #random – it’s about keeping up a daily rhythm of chatter. (Sometimes I am giggling so much from the #random channel that my husband thinks I am at a tween slumber party).
Beyond the giggles, our #give-props channel is at the core of our Slack ideal. We created it to be an ongoing space for team members to uplift each other, whether it’s celebrating a colleague after a rough client presentation, acknowledging one of their out-of-the-box ideas, or simply recognizing someone for showing up and doing something special and different.
This intimate digital participation is about making room for the moments that would naturally happen in an office, but codified in a permanent way (even better!), which employees can screenshot and come back to when they need a pick-me-up. (I even have a folder on my desktop called “Happy Reminders” of these screenshots – it reminds me of the ~old days~ of printing photos and framing them to keep on my desk.)
Over the years, Slack has evolved from a communication tool to our shared language. And any shared language, of course, needs a dictionary. So, we created a “Daly Emoji Legend” – an ever-evolving archive of team lore, inside jokes, peak meme culture, and more – that lives permanently within our Operations Manual.
Need to acknowledge a moment of brilliance? That’s consistently “Cool Doge” (in fact, we have a lot of dog references). Trying to encourage a team member that they're up for the big task ahead? "Got This In the Bag" is perfect for the occasion.
And then there’s “Paw” – not just an emoji, but a whole feeling – a warm, supportive acknowledgement, in emoji reaction form. The history behind Paw is too long to explain. But after working with Daly, you just start to…get it.
We also have baby versions of our team members immortalized in emoji form, so you can respond to their messages with, well, them.
And the variety of parrot emojis bring their own energy – whether it’s “Party Parrot” celebrating a win or “Everything’s Fine Parrot”offering a positive affirmation, they’ve become a staple of how we communicate.
Some workplaces have jargon; we have an entire emoji dialect. Many of our custom emojis start as images or videos shared in Slack – capturing a story, a feeling, or a mood – before evolving into shorthand for inside jokes. The kind you’d normally create over lunch in the office, now just…in emoji form.
It’s not all just cute emoji vibes – accountability matters
I mentioned that our Emoji Legend is in our Operations Manual, and that’s an important note. Transparency at Daly is as much about practice as it is about policy. And with that, we fully operationalized how to live this remote culture on a regular basis.
For example, we expect every message to be acknowledged in a timely manner. If there’s an update, a question, or even just an interesting read that could spark an idea, it belongs in the relevant Slack channel, where the right teammates can pick it up and run with it. That means a quick “Got it!” or emoji reaction when you’re tagged, so no one’s left wondering if their message vanished into the void.
It’s less about urgency, and more about clarity and accountability – ensuring that if something needs attention, it actually gets it. Of course, if you need time off Slack to rest, be heads down for hours on a task, or to take a meeting, just let the team know.
And just as we say our hellos in the morning when the work day begins, we all sign off with a friendly “goodnight!”
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The Cherry on Top: The key to any good workplace environment (as with any good relationship) is clear and consistent communication. Slack isn’t perfect – but at its core, it offers a space for equal access and communication at all levels of a company. But only if you set it up that way, and enforce it! At its best, Slack improves upon the IRL workplace, because there are no closed doors, and no stratification between the top and the bottom of the org chart. Lean into this fact, and your workplace (and employees) will shine.
OK i died with the Gregorian chant x Selena Gomez mashup!!