Workflow Tactics

Starting from scratch inside workflow builder

When I first opened Slack Workflow Builder with the intention of making an onboarding flow for new members, it looked deceptively easy. The Start button is big, the interface is clean, but then the options collapse into these little dropdowns that feel like you are digging through the back of a junk drawer. I clicked on Create, chose From scratch, and immediately realized I had no idea which trigger to actually pick. The natural instinct is to choose the member-joins-channel trigger, because in theory every new hire gets added to a welcome channel, right? The problem is, in practice, HR sometimes adds them late, or a manager does it manually, so testing this trigger was a mess. Half the time, the workflow just never fired, leaving me staring at an empty channel thinking, “Did I just waste another hour poking at this thing”

I eventually switched to the shortcut trigger. The logic became: HR fills in a form by running the shortcut manually, instead of relying on Slack to detect a new join. That tiny shift saved my sanity, because now I could test it anytime without creating fake Slack accounts. To any beginner reading this, do not waste a full afternoon like I did debugging the member-join trigger. It is neat in theory, unstable in practice. 🙂

Making the first form actually useful

After choosing a trigger, Slack Workflow Builder prompts you to add steps. The form builder is where most people mess up during onboarding automation. At first, I created the default blank form and left it with a single name field. Useless. What you really want is to capture role, manager, department, and maybe start date. But be careful about long forms. If you throw six or seven questions at HR, they will stop filling it out correctly — trust me, mine literally started putting “N A” in the title field just to get through it faster.

One trick that made my form work properly was rearranging the questions in a way that aligned with how HR actually thinks. They always know the manager first, then the role, then the department. If you place questions in that order, the form gets filled without hesitation. When I had department first, I was getting weird backtracking because HR would think, “Wait, is this engineering under product or product under engineering” and then Slack would save those wrong answers directly into the workflow variables. It felt like a small annoyance at first, but downstream steps would spit out introductions like “Welcome to the support department” even though the person was an engineer. 😛

Sending automated welcome messages

The next step is where it starts feeling real. Once the form sends data, you can pipe that into a Slack message. The builder gives you a light gray box where you type the text, and you can copy variables like {{formField}} into it. My mistake was making the message way too long. I was including links to the PTO policy, the company wiki, the expense sheet, the code repository access form, all in one automated message. Guess what happened — nobody read it. The new hire responded with “thanks” and the info was buried forever.

I finally cut it down to two short lines and a single link to a Notion landing page. A message that looks clean gets way more engagement. Another funny bug I hit: sometimes when a variable pulls in blank values, Slack posts double spaces or awkward parentheses like “Welcome to department under ”. To fix that, I just started writing more generic text so variables were optional. It is not as personalized, but at least it avoids embarrassing typos.

Getting managers to actually participate

Honestly, the biggest struggle in onboarding automation is not the technical builder but the people you need to rope into it. For example, I wanted to automatically notify a manager whenever their new hire was added. In theory, you use the workflow step Send a message and tag the manager variable. But managers hate unexpected pings. I tested it and immediately got a Slack DM from a manager saying, “why am I getting these messages at 11 pm” because the workflow launched when HR triggered it, not based on work hours.

The quick hack was adding the workflow step Send form to someone else instead. Instead of sending a message, the workflow sends a simple action form to the manager asking “When would you like to schedule your new hire intro call” and then notifies them with a single button click. That way, they feel in control. Lesson learned — automation that pushes information can fail, but automation that asks for one small clear input usually succeeds.

Building a resource hub inside Slack

My onboarding workflow eventually grew into three parts. The welcome message, the manager notification, and then a followup thread with resources. This is where I put the deeper reading — but not in Slack itself. Slack is too noisy for long policy links. I compiled a Notion doc with checklists like “request laptop,” “sign payroll form,” and “add yourself to common channels.” The tricky bit was delivering that without looking spammy.

I ended up funneling it through Slack bookmarks. The workflow adds a bookmark to the #welcome channel with the title New Hire Starter Pack. Bookmarks in Slack sit at the top of a channel, which visually feels more permanent than a message. That solved my problem of new hires scrolling away and never seeing the content again. Funny enough, one new engineer told me they thought the bookmark had always been there, as if it was just part of Slack, not something I put there with a workflow. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Handling mistakes and failed runs

If you build workflows long enough, you’ll notice they sometimes just fail with red error text. My first broken run happened because I renamed a form field. I changed the question “Manager name” to “Direct Manager” and suddenly half my steps that referenced {{Manager name}} stopped working. The builder does not warn you about this. The failure appears only when the workflow runs live, which feels cruel. I had to delete every step, repaste the message, and ensure the variable names matched. Painful lesson.

Another bug I hit: Slack occasionally duplicates trigger events. For some reason, the shortcut would fire twice in a row, posting two identical welcome messages. To fix it, I added a fake buffer step — sending the form data to a private test channel first. That way I could see whether the trigger duplicated before pushing to a public channel. It is a bit hacky, but it saved me embarrassment.

Testing without annoying your team

The worst feeling is testing a workflow live and spamming the whole team with test messages. I did that once and instantly had several coworkers asking if we hired ten interns at once. A simple method to avoid that is creating a private channel just for workflow testing. Add only yourself and maybe one HR partner. Run all the onboarding sequences there until you are sure it works. Only then switch the destination back to the real #welcome channel.

Slack does not give you a sandbox environment, so this private channel hack becomes your only safe space. I honestly wish Workflow Builder had a preview mode where you could simulate runs without sending anything. Until then, treat test channels like your personal lab bench.

When to give up and add another tool

As much as I like Slack Workflow Builder, I admit there are limits. For instance, I wanted to automatically invite new hires to recurring events like the all-hands call. No step exists for that. You can only send messages and forms. At that point, you have to pull in another tool like Zapier or Workato. Zapier can catch a Slack trigger and then add that person to a Google Calendar event. But even there, the API sometimes lacks permissions, and you’ll find yourself halfway through editing a Zap while twenty tabs are still open.

If you are a beginner, my advice is to start with simple Slack-only flows before chaining external platforms. Slack workflows excel at short informative nudges. Once you cross into “real integration” territory, you will spend just as much time fixing broken Zaps as onboarding new people. And on days where everything fails at once, you end up laughing at how an automation meant to save time somehow caused you to burn a whole afternoon.

Small tweaks that improved adoption

After many experiments, I found tiny adjustments worked better than chasing perfection. For example, I added one emoji reaction automatically through the bot every time a workflow printed a welcome message. Just a little wave felt warmer. I also time-delayed some steps so they appeared five minutes apart, avoiding the “wall of text” vibe. And I set HR’s shortcut button to appear in their app shortcuts menu, so they never forgot where to find it. None of those changes are big features, but together, they made people actually treat the automation as part of the process rather than some side project I built and then abandoned.

The best part was overhearing a new hire ask, “Who runs the welcome Slack posts” and managers saying, “Oh it just happens automatically.” That moment was when I knew the workflow finally blended into the background the way it should.