The Employee Experience Builder is how you automate an employee journey in CultureBot. You choose what starts it, add the steps that should follow, and it runs on its own in Slack for everyone who hits that trigger. Onboarding, preboarding, cohort programs, and event reminders all run without anyone remembering to send anything.
Here’s a full look at what it does today, plus five experiences you can set up this week. If you’d rather skip to building, the setup guide walks through every option, and there’s a one-page overview if you need something to share with your leadership team.
Four ways to start an experience
The trigger decides who gets enrolled and when the clock starts.
| Trigger | Best for |
| First seen in Slack Enrolls automatically the first time CultureBot sees the account | Onboarding that starts the moment IT provisions someone |
| Joins a specific channel The channel becomes the enrollment mechanism | Cohorts, employee resource groups, manager tracks, training |
| An employee’s start date Start dates come from your HRIS (human resources information system) sync, a CSV import, or manual entry on the employee directory | Preboarding, manager prep, buddy assignment |
| A specific date and time Workspace-wide, and can repeat on an interval | All-hands, open enrollment, launches, campaigns |
On a start date experience, steps can run up to 7 days before someone starts and up to 180 days after.
Three automated actions
Automate every step in an experience with one or more of these three actions. You can mix all three in a single experience.
Message
Send to an employee, a channel, a group of specific people, or via direct message to everyone in a channel.
• Add an @channel mention on channel posts
• Choose the sender, so a message can come from CultureBot or be attributed to your CEO, HR lead, or the employee’s manager
• Rich composer with links, GIF and image support, plus @-mention autocomplete
Survey
Attach any survey form you’ve already built and choose who receives it.
• Aim it at the employee, their manager, their buddies, specific people, or a whole channel
• Set responses to anonymous or attributed per step
• Results flow into your standard Surveys reporting, including AI summaries of open text
Shoutout
Post a recognition card to a channel using any of your configured shoutout types.
• Configurable sender and recipient
• A manager can publicly welcome their new hire on day one, automatically
• Uses the same recognition types and points your team already has set up
Timing, personalization, and routing
Timing. Each step is offset from the one before it in hours, days, or business days. Business days skip weekends, so a day three check-in never lands on a Saturday. Every step also has its own delivery time, set in your timezone or the employee’s local one, which means a 9am message reaches someone in Berlin at 9am in Berlin.
Personalization. Any message or shoutout pulls live data from the employee record: first name, full name, manager, buddies, team, department, location, title, start date, tenure, birthday, and more. You can also create your own variables and point them at specific people. If your welcome message mentions an IT contact, set up an IT lead variable once, then map it to the right person for each department. The message text stays the same and the correct name appears every time.
Manager and buddy routing. CultureBot stores a manager and a buddy for every employee, managed in a filterable Pairings view with CSV export. Because those roles are real destinations for a step, an experience can reach the people around a new hire and not just the new hire. Buddy pairings can even be assigned by work email before someone exists in Slack, and they link automatically once the account appears.
Five experiences you can build this week
Each of these takes about 15 minutes. The average experience our customers run is around two or three steps, so small really does work here.
1. New hire welcome
Great for: onboarding automation
Trigger: first seen in Slack
• Day 1, message: a direct message to the new hire with their day one guide
• Day 1, shoutout: a post to your general channel from their manager welcoming them
• Day 5, survey: an anonymous check-in on how week one is going
2. Manager preboarding prep
Great for: manager enablement, onboarding buddy programs, keeping busy IT and HR teams in the loop
Trigger: employee’s start date
• 5 business days before: a message to the manager or HR team. Laptop ordered? Buddy assigned? First-week calendar blocked?
• 1 day before: a message to the buddy letting them know their person starts tomorrow
3. 30-day check-in from both sides
Great for: automated feedback loops
Trigger: employee’s start date
• Day 30, survey to the employee: how supported do you feel, and is the role what you expected?
• Day 30, survey to their manager: how is ramp-up tracking?
4. Event flow
Great for: open enrollment, HR announcements, all-hands and company sync reminders
Trigger: specific date and time, set to repeat
• 3 days before: a channel announcement
• 1 hour before: a channel reminder
• 1 day after: an anonymous feedback survey
5. Cohort or program onboarding
Great for: learning and development programs, employee resource groups, special projects
Trigger: joins a specific channel
• On join: a welcome message and what to expect
• On a cadence: resource drops through the program
• Midpoint: a pulse survey
• Completion: a shoutout to the channel
How the Employee Experience Builder pairs with Surveys
You have two ways to run a survey in CultureBot, and they answer different questions.
A standalone campaign goes out on a company-wide calendar. Choose one-time, weekly, biweekly, or monthly presets, a custom interval, or automatic delivery at 7, 30, 60, or 90 days after someone joins. Send it to everyone, a channel, specific people, a department, or a work location. You get five question types, anonymous or attributed responses, optional reminders, and optional reward points for responding.
A survey step inside an experience fires at one precise point in someone’s journey, like day five or the 30-day mark or the week after an event. It can go to the employee, or to their manager or buddy about them.
Both land in the same reporting. The quarterly survey tells you how the company feels right now, and the moment-level responses tell you where to look when that number moves. Running both is where this gets genuinely useful. More on how CultureBot Surveys work →
Building and managing your experiences
Start from a template, duplicate an experience you already like, or build from blank. A short wizard walks you through setup and ends on a review screen with a live preview of every message exactly as the recipient will see it. You can pause or resume any experience without losing it, and each one keeps a full log of every message delivered. For step-by-step help creating or editing one, our complete setup guide walks through every trigger, action, and timing option.
Happy to build your first one with you
In CultureBot, recognition, celebrations, surveys, intros, and journeys all run on the same employee data and the same reporting, inside Slack. If you’re already a customer, reach out to your account contact and we’ll map your first experience together.
