With Slack being used more and more across organisations, and with a lot of Executive Assistants being tasked with setting it up and administering it, we’ve looked at some of the top integrations that Executive Assistants can implement to become more efficient. More importantly, it will encourage your teams to be more efficient too!!
With 20% of your cognitive capacity lost when you context switch, and with it taking about 20 minutes to get back on track after you’ve swapped to another app or conversation, the more you can do within the same app, the better.
Here at Quorum One, we work with many different companies to integrate their environments to Slack. We’ve come up with a list of our top Slack integrations that help Executive Assistants stay on top of things.
Google Calendar
Slack has a completely native integration for Google Calendar which can be integrated in just a few clicks. It allows you to see if people are in a meeting as it gives you the option to display a calendar icon next to your name. It also sends you a nudge when your meetings are about to start
Zoom
Create a Zoom meeting directly from your chat. All you have to do is type /zoom and it starts a meeting for you. You don’t have to leave Slack and go over to your calendar at all - saving you some precious seconds and avoiding the need to wait for someone to go into their emails and accept your invitation.
Polly
If you’ve not tried Polly yet, this one is a must. Polly is a forms and surveys tool which allow you to get instant feedback from your team. Some really great use cases for Polly are Onboarding Feedback, live interactive games, and even employee awards. You can also get data from your surveys without having to copy and paste the responses into something else. There’s a free option for small companies.
Notion or Evernote
Notion, Evernote, or whichever note taking app your company uses. No longer will you have to copy and paste, or even retype your notes. Get them directly into Slack with a straightforward integration.
Zapier
Zapier is a Must Have for pretty much all businesses, and Executive Assistants can save a monumental amount of time on all kinds of things. Zapier is basically a pipe which can connect pretty much any app to any app and once you start using it, you’ll wonder how you ever managed to do without it. Imagine if you could automatically add items from your to-do list from a Slack channel; or post to a Slack channel directly from Gmail.
HiBob or WorkDay
HiBob, WorkDay, or any of your HR apps which tracks annual leave. If you connect it to Slack, you can alert people or channels when someone is off sick or on annual leave. You can even set it up so that you can request your annual leave from directly in Slack.
Monday or Trello
Monday, Trello, or whichever project management tool you use to keep track of your major work projects. When you invite Trello to your channel, you can automatically see updates to cards or boards. The same applies to Monday with you being able to create new items or update existing ones within Slack
Outlook and Gmail
One of the best use cases for the Outlook or Gmail integration is being able to take an email chain that might include a customer and move it to a slack channel to collaborate. This way you don’t accidentally include the customer on your response!
Salesforce or Hubspot
Salesforce, Hubspot, or whichever CRM system your company might use. These integrations are a little more complex as there are so many thing that they can do. But think about being able to alert the company when a deal gets closed, or notify the delivery team when a close date is pushed out. Keep everyone up to date without having to write out new messages all the time.
Channitor
Channitor can automatically alert you when there’s been no activity in a channel for a while, and you can set an expiration date to the channels so it gets archived automatically.
What have you integrated with your Slack? Or what do you think would be awesome to integrate?
Want help planning your Slack integration approach?
Quorum1 is an official partner of Salesforce and Slack, with hundreds of certifications across our growing team of specialists. Slack is an amazing platform and we are passionate about helping our clients use it to its fullest.
Through the experience of building dozens of Slack apps, the Quorum1 team has amassed a collection of best practices, templates, and workflows that help us streamline every step of the process of building your next Slack integration or implementation.
For more information go here: The Slack Quorum
About the Author
Yvette Pearson was an EA and Office Manager for more than 15 years, having worked across multiple sectors and in various sized companies. In the last five or so years she has transitioned into Operational Consultancy, including Slack implementation. Yvette is a Certified Slack Consultant and Admin, 2x Hubspot certified, 2x Monday CRM certified, and forever an EA!