Virtual Team Building Activities ideas for your next meeting or event. With a virtual team, it can be hard to get everyone together in the same place physically to work through challenges. Fortunately, there are many great tools out there for companies with remote employees that can help facilitate and even gamify collaborative work. In this post, we’ll explore one such company called Slack and show you how it is revolutionizing the way teams communicate remotely.
Slack provides a platform for teams to collaborate both inside and outside of the traditional business hours. You get a record of all the important conversations and can easily follow up on topics later.
Slack has its own internal currency called “Slacks” that can be awarded for participation and help provide transparency into how each member contributes to the team.
According to Fast Company, Slack is currently being used by more than 6 million people around the world. It was recently valued at $3.8 billion dollars which is almost as much as Twitter’s market cap! That’s some serious momentum behind an enterprise-grade collaboration platform.
Why Are We Talking About Slack, Again?
Quite simply, it’s a tool that can help build better teams. It’s been proven to increase productivity and creativity in the workplace. With Slack being used by so many different companies, it lends itself to some great collaboration opportunities. We’ve outlined a few below that you can try out for yourself or utilize in your next meeting.
Use Slack to facilitate remote brainstorming sessions.
Have participants enter a channel dedicated to the task and then open up another channel for anyone who wants to listen in on the discussion. The first topic discussed should be fairly broad so that each member of the group has an opportunity to contribute ideas early on. The goal here is to get everyone focused and excited about the idea instead of just listening to someone’s plan for creating it.
Initiate a brainstorming session over Slack.
This can be used for similar purposes as #1 above, but instead of having everyone focus on a single topic, this is more like an “idea jam.” For this activity, you might simply ask each team member to make 10 new ideas about the product or service you are currently working on. It can be fun to see who comes up with the most creative ideas and then take them one step further by sharing those ideas with your teammates.
Use Slack as a forum for voting on company initiatives.
The advantages of this activity are that it is a collaborative process that can be done on the fly. Everyone can log in to Slack and vote on initiatives. Also, it makes it very easy for participants to feel involved and to see how their input compares with the rest of the team.
Create a “Slack Bot” that can help streamline your meetings, schedule task lists and more.
This is a great way to utilize Slack outside of daily communication so that you can free up more time for other tasks around the office. To get started with your own bot, you’ll first want to create an account by clicking here. Then, sign up for a new Airtable account here.
Once you’ve created your Slack bot, you can now integrate your team using the following Airtable connections:
- Slack Channel
- Slack Group DM (Direct Message) to Channel (Channel Membership)
- Slack Group DM to User (User Membership)
This is a fun way to learn more about each member of your team. The more you know, the better you can help support them and create an environment where everyone feels connected. It’s one of those things that is easy to do but produces great returns when it comes time to make decisions or collaborate on certain tasks.
Slack Bot Features
Let’s say you have a Slack integration that allows you to create a new bot. Using Airtable, you can take that a step further and use a feature called “function.” Function is an API feature in Airtable which allows for custom scripts to be written for Bots like Slack or HipChat. This particular feature allows us to create scripts or functions within our bot that will help it reactivate on certain events and execute functions based on the events that occur. So, if someone sends a message to the channel, this function will execute and perform some action within Slack reminders to your team. This can include things such as displaying a different message or even making the bot mark as offline.
Slack Bots
This particular Slack Bot is called Slackbot, and it’s only channel in the app is called “Admin.” But, if we add another team member to our Airtable account, the bot will know that she isn’t an admin user. In this case, when the team member sends a message into this channel, the bot will know to not respond with any information and will instead send her to a DM via Direct Message on Slack. Additionally, the bot will also automatically display any information that you have placed into your Airtable organization. Here is a screenshot showing how our bot looks on Slack:
Additional Resources
In this article, we’ve explored 4 different ways to make Slack a more productive addition to your everyday work life. If these ideas resonate with you, then we think you should consider getting started on the journey of using Slack in your own business as quickly as possible. Remember to check out our other articles if you are interested in learning more about how to utilize other basic business software applications like Microsoft Excel, Trello or Asana as well.
We hope this information was helpful, and that you’ll do your best to test out some of these applications on a regular basis. If we’ve missed anything, don’t hesitate to drop us a comment below! We always look forward to hearing from our readers and we’ll be sure to answer each of your questions as quickly as possible.
Like what you read? Leave us a comment! We always love hearing from our readers. Let us know which Slack tools you utilize most often and we’d be happy to help those who are interested in learning more about using Slack in their everyday work life.
