As manager of Rivian’s Digital Workplace, Sheryl Anderson is receiving our Admin of the Year Award for advocating for Slack within the electric vehicle company, and for pioneering the ways in which fellow employees can use the productivity platform to streamline work and drive cutting-edge business results.
At the heart of the electric vehicle company is sustainability, and leadership has signed the Climate Pledge to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. Critical to Rivian’s mission is a collaborative culture that enables employees with a wide range of skill sets to work together to make thousands of important decisions every day.
To drive agility and efficiency while delivering its coveted fleet of electric passenger and commercial vehicles to a long list of excited buyers, Rivian needed to unify how its workers collaborated across home offices, factories, facilities, showrooms and partner offices. An exponential increase in headcount and multiple new hubs meant seamless hiring and onboarding was essential. Rivian also needed to ensure an enterprise-ready level of compliance and security to protect the company’s intellectual property—without compromising user experience.
The solution was Slack, and thanks to Anderson’s determination and hard work to instill best practices, there has been 85% usage adoption companywide. In fact, Slack now connects over 15,000 monthly active users who capitalize on Slack channels, easy-to-manage threads, emoji and reactions, @mentions and the search function to get work done. On top of that, there’s been a 76% improvement in new employee ramp-up time thanks to a new in-Slack process that helps build a collaborative culture from the get-go.
Anderson’s attention to Rivian’s mission doesn’t stop there. Within manufacturing operations, she encouraged the use of Slack’s apps and automation features to help drive speed to market and bring the monitoring, alerting and reporting of incidents right into Slack. Teammates are able to streamline processes and avoid the drag of context switching by directly integrating 231 applications, and by relying on 1,000 workflows that connect plant workers, Rivian’s industrial operating system, its ticketing system and the engagement team. Driving productivity through automation in Slack has saved an estimated $8.2 million for Rivian’s team annually.
Anderson is also integral to Rivian’s ongoing exploration of the Salesforce Service Cloud integration within Slack. Thanks to the integration, Rivian’s teams will be able to handle each event with a high-touch attention to detail, providing best-in-class service to each owner.
“Having Salesforce and Slack together will be valuable in focusing on two core areas: automate as much as possible and enable cross-functional stakeholders to make better decisions faster.”
Slack also enables Rivian to collect relevant information across 4,400 data points, which has helped power a companywide efficiency analysis for continuous improvement in productivity. Externally, the teams have opted to forgo email for Slack Connect to streamline communication with clients, partners and vendors.
From onboarding to culture to external collaboration, Anderson is engaged in strong relationships with cross-team partners across the company, driving Rivian’s use of Slack across all possible touchpoints to ensure that it can deliver R1S, R1T and EDC models to happy customers everywhere.
