I gave a talk on this idea few years ago, that even just the metadata of slack messages was enough to make improvements to process. As a support engineer it was

I gave a talk on this idea few years ago, that even just the metadata of slack messages was enough to make improvements to process. As a support engineer it was useful for us to see when we were asking questions in slack, what the patterns were to improve our team training: Ticket comes in -> we don't know -> we link to ticket in X channel. Tally the channel links, look at chart, identify patterns. In an office, this would require me to be an EXTREME micro manager, whereas remotely, I just paid attention and used the meta data to drive our training. In an office, you could ask the team to keep track, or to tell you what they noticed, but by having a direct tap into the data stream, the team just does the work. (This requires a high degree of trust, and we were looking _inward_ so it wasn't something that was met with disdain. If we were using this to compare what teams were more responsive and being outwardly critical, well, I don't think that will go over well anywhere.)