Slack has managed to be a useful tool to manage remote work & streamline team coordination effectively.
With ongoing Covid-19 disruption, the app has proven to be even more important.
Although many users are happy with Slack’s basic functionality, the app offers a plethora of tools in its directory for optimizing remote work even further. The companies can make a highly-functional virtual office space using these optimization tools. It’s high time you move beyond using the basic functionality & use these 8 tools to manage remote employees effectively:
1. Karma
Can you remember how teachers used to give stars for doing great work? Through a performance points system, you can use Karma as an HR tool to bolster team engagement and reward your employees. Knowledge & application of Karma is something that every recruiter should consider adding in their HR resume.
Karma notes your employee’s achievements and gives them the praise they deserve, which essentially leads to a happier work environment.
Since remote work is likely to cause a lack of engagement for your employees. Karma is a great tool to remind them that their expertise is valued.
But that is not all. While valuing your employees is an important aspect to lead an effective workspace. With its performance tracking system, Karma creates reports for managers perusal that are filled with insights on their employee’s work.
Here’s what you can do with Karma:
- Performance points: Give points to your employees and track their performance. Basically, you are promoting excellence in your team, which improves productivity.
- Salary bonuses: You can set bonuses for your employees based on their karma points. You can arrange to reward your employees and improve their performance via a rewards-based system.
- Inspire: You can inspire your employees by encouraging them to work better. For instance, you can give extra karma points to teams that are submitting their key deliverable early.
2. Officevibe
A tool for engaging with your employees, Officevibe helps you get insights from your employees to achieve team satisfaction.
These surveys will identify the pointers where your team is lacking or any inaccuracies in the team’s functioning.
Here’s how Officevibe can help you:
- You can identify the issues prevailing in your team. Whether it’s collaboration, engagement, or lack of recognition, you can fix these issues before they become severe.
- You can acknowledge the work being done by your team members and bolster trust among your employees.
- Improve team collaboration and the team’s efficiency by hearing the opinion of your employees.
- As per the feedback given by your employees concerning the company, you can make changes in your policies to treat and serve your employees better.
3. Zoom for Slack
Face-to-face interaction is 34 times more effective than texting or emails. Hence, to manage remote employees effectively, you need to interact with them frequently.
A video conferencing service for businesses, Zoom for Slack, allows you to instantly share audio, screen, video from a Slack channel/group. All you need to do is give a command “/zoom” that will send you a Link URL to join a meeting.
Some features of Zoom that can be immensely helpful:
- You can conduct a one-on-one interaction or prepare for a group meeting with a limit of up to 500 individuals.
- You can have the recorded meeting sent over to your channel along with the meeting summary, length, detail for attendees, etc.
4. Donut
Companies strive to achieve a feeling of connectedness among their team members, and these efforts can be hard to apply during remote work. For instance, newly onboarded remote team members may lack this feeling. Donut optimization can help you bridge that gap.
It will allow employees to get to know each other through messages as you can pair your employees for a virtual meet. Virtual meetups can have remote coffee meetings or lunches, donut meetups, etc.
This can serve as a team-building exercise that will improve collaboration among your employees.
For instance, one of DistantJob’s favorite slack optimizations is the Donut bot. Every Tuesday, each employee of the company gets paired with another colleague and schedules a Zoom virtual coffee (or happy hour) over the week. This helps strengthen the company’s culture by giving each employee a space to connect and bond with members that they usually don’t interact with.
5. Jibble
Jibble is a great time optimization tool that allows you to track the logged time of employees, attendance, etc. You can have your employees download the application on Slack and give a tutorial on how to use it.
It can be operated by giving simple “in” and “out” commands. The logs and timesheets are available for the employer’s perusal to streamline the process and understand when your employees sit down to work.
Once you have an idea about the timings they usually work in, if you have an additional task for them, you will know who you should reach out to.
Further, you can divide up the time tracker into different tasks. For instances, if you can have a blog team, you can divide the tasks into:
- Writing
- QCing & editing
- Adding images & keywords
- Sharing on social media platforms
You can track the time for each task. For instance, if QCing & editing takes more time than usual, you can track these problems and deploy resolutions immediately.
Although it might be a useful application, mainly for helping new remote employees who might not know how to organize their time or struggle with some tasks, It’s highly recommended encouraging flexibility as well. Tracking employee’s performance sometimes is not as effective as many managers think.
6. Dash
Dash allows you to create time-bound temporary channels to work on specific tasks. It’s just like any other slack channel, but the temporary factor keeps the team focused on the goal.
Just by using a “/dash command,” you can create a new channel and add members of your team. For instance, remote teams may have a lot of clutter clogged up in the main channel and do not want to clutter it; you can use this feature for temporary tasks.
Once you are done with the channel, you can archive it and keep your platform neat.
7. Polly
While working remotely, employers may face troubles in getting answers to simple questions. For instance, in a traditional office space, when you need to hold a product review meeting, you can simply ask your employees about the schedule as to when it should be held.
Polly allows you to do the same in a virtual environment. You can make a poll for any decision or feedback by simply writing the question and the multiple-choice options for your employees to choose from.
You can even liaise with your clients through these polls. Through shared channels, you can share the polls and keep their say/feedback in line.
8. ToDoBot
Having to remind your employees of their tasks and closing deadlines is tiring. A task management tool for Slack, ToDoBot allows you to assign tasks while discussing projects on channels and setting deadlines.
In this manner, you can create tasks for your employees right away, instead of spending time on a project management tool.
Further, you can share the progress of the projects with your clients as well. Through Slack shared channels, you can showcase the process to your customers/clients and keep them in the loop. You can create a shared roadmap with your clients and successfully work on the key deliverables.
