Slack may not be the only instant messaging tool on the market, but it’s undoubtedly one of the most popular. Organizations everywhere are using the platform to collaborate across time zones and from different locations. Real-time messaging and file sharing between remote teams wouldn’t be possible without interactive software like Slack.
While live communication is essential to team success, it’s not the only thing required to achieve objectives. Apps that help organize, prioritize, and manage projects are additional ways to keep everyone moving in the right direction. You also need a way to document meetings and track any no follow-up tasks that come out of them.
Slack integrations designed to boost productivity can support your team’s efforts, combining that support with the platform’s powerful communication capabilities. From organizing discussions to prioritizing to-do lists, here are five Slack integrations you’ll want to seriously consider.
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1. Fellow
You can’t hold a productive meeting if you can’t stay on task. Creating outlines and agendas before you get your team together keeps everyone focused. Colleagues know what the discussion is about, who’s presenting, and how they’re expected to contribute. Fellow’s meeting agenda software integrates seamlessly with Slack, allowing your team to receive daily reminders of future gatherings.
Embedded in these reminders is the ability to create and organize action items to prepare for meetings. These tasks can also become no follow-up items individuals need to complete. Fellow’s integration even lets team members use Slack Actions to move conversations into meeting agendas.
For example, you might be meeting later in the week to discuss the launch of a new promotion. However, there is already some confusion about what dates the promo will run and how clients can qualify for it. A few of your team members have been talking about it within Slack. They might decide to add a bullet point to the agenda that’s already been shared with the team. These employees can add their ongoing conversation to support the need for clarification.
2. Monday
Hot off a successful June 2021 IPO, the project management tool Monday is gaining traction among large organizations like Discovery and Wix. Monday lets employees collaborate on projects whether in-office or from remote locations. Team members can create, view, and assign tasks, while managers can see who’s working on various milestones and elevate priorities according to deadlines.
Monday’s integration lets your team members create project tasks from within their Slack conversations. They can sync updates to tasks and projects using details from Slack messages. The app integration also sends notifications about milestones that are close to their due dates.
Employees no longer have to toggle between apps. Instead, they view notifications, take action, add updates, and close tasks out in Slack. If needed, team members can reassign items to the next person in the workflow.
3. Adobe Creative Cloud
Design and creative teams will appreciate the capabilities of Adobe Creative Cloud’s Slack integration. Creative Cloud facilitates the storage and creation of video and image files. Most of these files are graphics-intensive and take up much more storage space than Word documents or Excel spreadsheets. Graphic and multimedia designers working with marketing teams often find these files difficult to share with colleagues.
Creative Cloud’s Slack integration helps fix that problem since designers can share previews of files within conversations and messages. The previews link back to the original files stored in Creative Cloud. All team members can view website mockups or new commercial videos and make comments directly from Slack.
Adobe’s integration also works with Slack channels, so the entire team will know when a new note is made. Plus, file updates or changes will be visible to everyone. Projects that require coordination among employees with various skill sets won’t get held up because someone didn’t see recent mockups. And creative teams working in remote or hybrid arrangements won’t have to wait for in-office opportunities to make suggestions.
4. Statsbot
Managers usually have access to reports and dashboards with metrics that individual contributors may not. Team members with highly specialized positions, such as social media and digital content management, might also work with metrics. These numbers, insights, and trends are additional items that may be invisible but useful to other employees.
Getting those reports out of a platform’s dashboard can be tricky, and the result isn’t always easy to read. Statsbot’s Slack integration lets you connect those reports and dashboards like Google Analytics so you can share them. Within Slack, you’re able to pull up metrics about Facebook campaigns, organic blog visits, and PPC ad clicks, for example.
Individual team members can request specific reports using Slack’s language commands. There’s also an option to pull and share data weekly or monthly. More importantly, if there’s a critical database change, notifications are sent within Slack. You’ll know to take down an ad if the product has been discontinued or is out of stock.
5. Appfluence’s Priority Matrix
Priority Matrix helps you organize and prioritize project tasks based on Eisenhower matrix principles. If you’re unfamiliar with the matrix, it arranges tasks by urgency and importance. The matrix contains four quadrants or categories to place items within.
Tasks can either be important or not important, in addition to urgent or not urgent. Important, urgent items are things your team needs to accomplish as soon as possible. You might need to make immediate decisions about non-urgent, important tasks, but they can wait a few days. Work items that are urgent but not important can be delegated, while unimportant, non-urgent tasks can remain in the pipeline.
With Priority Matrix’s Slack integration, you’ll be able to arrange and prioritize items directly from Slack messages. Your team will eliminate wasted time spent scrolling through conversations to find action items. Tasks applicable to the entire team or individuals can be instantly prioritized, making group and individual workloads more manageable.
Now that you know more about the potential of Slack integrations, your team can put them to work to make your business more productive. Before long, communication won’t be the only skill they’ll learn how to master.
