Let’s face it: remote work is here to stay. Though remote work brings a lot of advantages, its challenges must also be met in order to be successful as a team. Thankfully, there are many tools built to overcome the snags. Here are a few Slack Apps that can help you and your team stay in sync and distributed in 2023.

Follow Up Bot

You’ve asked a question in Slack. You even @ mentioned a teammate. Nobody answered (assume Truffle isn’t in the channel 😉). It hurts, right? Follow Up Bot is here to ease the pain. Just ask a question with an @ mention, and after a pre-set amount of time has passed, Follow Up Bot will ask if you’d like it to ping the person again in the channel. Impersonal, quick, and straightforward.

Vacation Tracker

People need a vacation! Your organization may have some steps in between thinking about sunshine and actually hitting the beach. Vacation Tracker is a unified system that handles these steps. Instead of going in between a personal request to management, Google Calendar, and possibly another tool, Vacation Tracker handles this all in one place. Figure out when employees will be away, handle and approve time-off requests, and manage leave types in the web dashboard. Here’s where their Slack app is really useful: it will remind your team who is on vacation and for how long, at an interval you specify. Additionally, you can see your vacation time remaining right on Slack.

Truffle

We couldn’t make a list of great Slack apps without mentioning Truffle! Truffle is a must-have Slack app for streamlining team communication. It utilizes previous conversations to provide instant answers to questions asked within a channel. And it’s fully automated, constantly scanning for relevant information, making it easy to find solutions without waiting for your teammates across the pond. Don’t want to ask in the channel? Users can directly ask Truffle for assistance and mark questions as answered with a simple ✅. Just ask Truffle and get the information you need to be on your way.

When an answer is found, Truffle posts a follow-up response to the original question.

Give Truffle a try, for free!

Standuply

It’s a staple of almost every team’s daily routine: the standup. When you’re faced with the challenge of multiple time zones, different working hours, and the async nature of work these days, getting everyone together for a single meeting can be challenging. And let’s be real, daily standup calls usually take too long! Standuply takes the pressure off by allowing you to schedule standups at a specific time, then pinging your teammates in Slack to have them answer questions that you specify. The report is then given directly back to you both in Slack and on their web dashboard.

Donezo

This is another great app that you should keep in your arsenal to help your team get stuff done, even if you’re not working in the office together every day. Donezo allows you to remind teammates about a task that they need to complete, all inside of Slack. Just set a task, a deadline, who should complete the task, and well…it’s… Donezo! You can assign a task to an individual or a group of Slack teammates, and you can easily check up on who has completed the task and who has not. Assignees will be reminded in Slack about their outstanding tasks as the deadline approaches.

Thanks for reading!

Hope you enjoyed this list. Look out for an upcoming post comparing several standup bots!