Introduction to Slack Automation

Slack has become the place to meet for remote companies, whether they are huge corporations or small startups. Slack automation aims to get the most out of the application and make things easier for your team.

The program has many helpful features to make your workday easier—but things get messy fast when too many channels and people get involved. Luckily, automation is changing the workplace of today.

Slack allows you to use bots and other tools to automate tasks in your workspace. This saves time and energy, freeing resources for more critical tasks.

With the right setup, you'll have a fully automated system that handles all the mundane work! Let's look at some things you automate with Slack to make your work day easier (and more fun).

Email Integration in Slack

While Slack makes chatting easy within the app, the preferred form for longer and more formal messages—especially from those outside your company—is still email. This particular automation brings email and Slack together, so you never miss a notification and get those replies quickly.

If you use Gmail or Microsoft Outlook, you can set up Slack to send the contents of any new email to a channel of your choice. That way, everyone has the latest info and works together to decide who is best suited to reply.

No takers? There's always Centro's "draft email" workflow step for writing the email together on Slack.

Using Polls in Slack

It's hard to keep up with everyone's opinions in the office, especially if your company is remote. Talking to individuals via email or private message is time-consuming, and who knows if they'll reply with enough time for you to decide.

With polls, employees can give their opinions with the click of a button, and automation allows them to do so without even leaving Slack.

Simple Poll is just what the name implies, allowing the creator to see the most popular choice and who chose what. The Poll's survey workflow takes this further, showing percentage bar graphs for each choice.

If you want to see how everyone feels via poll, Oskar, and Officevibe are great options. This automation is easy to use and understand so that answers will be quick, accurate, and readable.

Scheduling Made Easier with Slack

Finding a time when everyone is online (like those working part-time or in different time zones) is challenging with remote work. It's important to know who can meet when and keep everyone on the same page, and automation has solutions for you.

You can connect your Google Calendar, so Slack automatically updates your status when you have a calendar event. Alternatively, you can have it send channel updates based on your calendar instead. You can also use the X.ai Meeting Bot to find joint meeting times between you and your coworker.

Creating a Comfortable Work Environment

Working from home allows us to stay in our pajamas all day or work under layers of blankets. Still, it's hard to replicate the comfort of an office community.

Unfortunately, there's no way to bring an office birthday party or water cooler gossip to the digital sphere—but a few Slack automations offer courses for employees to bond, helping create a healthier and more productive workspace through trust.

BirthdayBot reminds all employees of upcoming company birthdays for a tiny annual festivity, then sends you a personalized message on your special day. Similarly, CharlieHR has a feature that lets employees know a new employee is starting, encouraging welcome wishes.

As for team building, the automation tool Icebreaker gives new employees fun questions to answer so their coworkers can get to know them. Donut and Lunch Buddies pair up employees randomly to share a snack or meal as an opportunity to get to know each other.

Automations = More "Slacking"

These are just a few of the automations you can use on Slack to make your workday more productive, efficient, and fun. Choosing the best automations for you and your business will save you time and effort while making it easier for teams to talk to each other and work together. As technology keeps getting better, so will Slack's automation features, which will let us let machines do boring tasks. At the same time, we enjoy our lives outside of work.

Position your organization for growth with automation.