The 8 Best Slack Apps to Boost your Company's Team Culture
The core Slack app is an incredible platform for remote teams (and one we at CultureBot have loved building on top of). While the core platform offers what a team needs to communicate and get work done, there are lots of amazing apps that can be added on to enhance the experience and boost your team's day-to-day productivity.
Social connections in work have been shown to have numerous benefits for both companies and the individuals. On the company side we can see increased productivity and more employee loyalty. For employees who are more connected we see less burnout, less stress and healthier lives.
We have compiled a list of the Slack apps below which give team member's opportunities to connect in new ways, build better bonds with one another, and ultimately have some fun. Let's dive in!
1. CultureBot
Culturebot is a collection of tools (all inside of Slack) built to enhance employee interactions and help lasting teammate connections to be built. The mission at CultureBot is to make it as easy as possible to setup these culture-building tools so any team can have the bot up and running in no time. To get CultureBot up and running requires only a simple click of the "add to Slack" button. After you do this, all of the tools can be setup within Slack in minutes. No external websites or logins to worry about! 🙂
Culturebot aims to your one stop shop for all things company culture. Here are some of the tools we offer:
- Trivia - Play a game any time you want with a simple command or schedule recurring games. With a large number of questions and ability to switch categories users can keep playing and challenging their brains in new areas.
- Birthday and Anniversary Celebrations - Make sure team members never miss their special days and feel appreciated!
- Water Cooler Prompts - A scheduled time on selected days where an interesting topic can be posted for team members to discuss.
- Employee Lottery - Randomly select team members to get prizes.
- Weekly Health Tip Messages - A weekly post to get team members talking and thinking about health!
2. Kaapi
Kaapi is a tool built around keeping everyone in a company on the same page and making sure that everyone's voice is heard.
The feature we really enjoy from Kaapi most is their "pulse" feature. Kaapi can retrieve the pulse of a company by asking engaging questions to users, on their morale, how effective they think meetings are going, etc. After all of this automated collection is completed, Kaapi can give data about who might need some additional motivation, or who needs their voice to be heard. In addition to the pulse feature Kaapi also offers tools to help run more effective meetings (by collecting some info in advance as well as a tool to ask icebreaker questions.
3. HeyTaco
HeyTaco is a simple tool to show appreciation in a super fun way (with tacos!) 🌮🌮🌮
Each day team members will get a limited number of tacos that can be used to show appreciation throughout the day. With HeyTaco the tacos become a token to be passed around to show someone how much they helped you. It feels great to both give and receive tacos and taco also offers tools to allow companies to setup prizes to be redeemed for these tacos. It's pretty neat -- check it out!
4. Donut
Donut (not to be confused with the delicious food) is a tool which gets team members talking. Donut is an amazing tool for making everyone connected on a team. Whether it's a new team member, or just someone you rarely directly communicate with Donut can bring people together.
One of the great things about Donut is the variety of different ways it can connect people. We really enjoy how Donut not only connects invidiuals, but in all the different ways people are introduced. Donut provides software to not only connect people together 1-on-1 but also in groups. These different groups of people allow for a variety of interactions that can bring the in the office kind of group interactions to a remote team that is missing it.
5. Polly
Polly offers quick and easy surveys for fast feedback from teams.
Polly surveys aim to be quick and fun for users. The company offers over 30 templates for surveys to make sure a company can learn how it's members are feeling in the best way possible. By using Polly instead of email companies were able get responses that were both better and faster. If you are working in HR or another role requiring user feedback the app also creates nice visualizations and graphs so the collected data can be used and acted on efficiently and quickly.
6. Simple Poll
Simple Poll is another polling tool similar to Polly (see #5) but focuses more on team members communicating on day to day tasks rather than a company collecting data.
By using a simple command in Slack, Simple Poll allows any team member to ask questions and get input from within a Slack workspace. The polls are very customizable. Polls made with Simple Poll can be reoccuring or one time, give each user a limited number of votes, and be anonymous if so desired.
7. Bored
Bored aims to eliminate boredom and allow people to take a break and get re-energized with a collection of games.
Bored seems to be one of the most advanced gaming platforms on Slack. The games are unique creative and fun. They also release a steady stream of updates and are constantly gathering feedback from their users. Whether it's seeing who can caption a meme the best, or who chooses the funniest way to roast a player this app will surely get your team laughing.
8. Giphy
Giphy is one of the most used repositories of hilarious GIFs shared all throughout the internet. There is a Slack extension available to bring all of these wacky and fun gifs into a team.
The Giphy app is simple but does it's job well. Just type in some text and the app will start giving you GIF suggestions to send along with it. Hit that shuffle button a couple times to find the perfect GIF and send it over!
And... that's a wrap. Hopefully after reading the above list you've got your eye on at least one culture app for Slack that you can try out with your team. No matter which one you decide to go with, there's no doubt in my mind that if you aren't optimizing for team culture yet today you will stand to benefit greatly from one or more of these tools. A team culture where people engage with one another, celebrate one another, and have (dare I say it) fun with one another -- is a healthy culture.
😄 Stay happy & healthy,
~ Amy