Speaker 1: Hey there, this is Liam Martin back at it again with another video, and I don't just love remote work. I love tech too. Or I guess I love tech because I love remote work. That's pretty meta of me. I love all things tech, gadgets, even unboxing gadgets, apps, bots, plugins, I'm all about that. Today I'm going to be sharing some of the best Slack apps in the industry and how you should be using them inside of your workflow. Let's go. If you love remote work or tech and you haven't subscribed to this YouTube channel, do you really love them that much? Show your love, do me a favor and please hit that subscribe button down below so that Igor doesn't hurt me. I've talked a bunch about Slack, how to best manage your Slack so that it's not managing you, while Salesforce paid $28 billion for it and the like. I use Slack every day for work, but yeah, it can be a lot. If you've been using Slack for a while now, or if you're new to it, you might be a little bit overwhelmed by all of the channels, threads, mentions, et cetera. Well frankly, there's a lot of apps here that can help you out with that. So Slack is a great app. Clearly it was so great that it was worth $28 billion. I'm still literally getting over that, that Salesforce paid to be able to acquire Slack and it totally changed the industry of work messaging. Take a look at Microsoft Teams. You would have no Microsoft Teams without Slack. It's basically a direct response to Slack's impact on enterprise and SMB work productivity and communication tools. Slack is similar in ways to Salesforce because it's become its own little ecosystem with a ton of other tools built to make Slack even better. These are the Slack integrations that I think you shouldn't be working without. First up is Cloverpop and that sounds like a wacky little name for an app, but it is basically a smart AI assistant to help manage your tasks and reminders. I like Cloverpop for three main reasons. It helps make decisions faster, it boosts visibility and transparency, and keeps track of accountability. Cloverpop uses polls to help get decisions made faster. People vote and decisions are literally made. I like to say silence is agreement. This allows or even forces people to be less silent and to have their voices heard. Leading on to visibility and transparency, you can see what decisions are being made. So there's a tool to announce what was decided and then you can actually track it. There's a built-in reminder system to hold people accountable for any tasks that they have based on what they've decided that they're actually going to do. And you can measure up the performance and the results based on what was agreed upon. Next up is Wade's fantastic company, Zapier. I literally would not have a business if it wasn't for Zapier. Zapier supports more than 3,000 different apps. More than likely, Zapier is helping integrate, automate, or innovate something you use for work and you probably don't even know about it. And that's actually the way it's supposed to be. Zapier allows you to connect apps without knowing code. Someone registers for a webinar you're hosting, boom, you can zap that. Add a person's info to your MailChimp campaign, boom, you can just literally do that. It's quite literally that easy. Where Zapier works magic for Slack is being able to connect to those 3,000 other apps. Someone on your sales team closes a deal in your CRM, zap. There's going to be an announcement Slack message auto-generated on that particular channel. Someone fills out a survey on Google Forms, zap, you get that notification. Basically, Zapier is a must-have to really maximize how you use Slack. Speaking of Google Forms, Google Drive does connect with Slack via Zapier for notifications. But if you've run your business on Google Workspaces like we do at Running Remote, this is a must-have. Basically, when you connect to Slack with Google Drive, you no longer have to actually click and drag to attach files. You can search for everything in your Google Drive literally while in Slack. It's pretty fantastic. There's also a few other cool features you'll learn to not want to live without. You can comment and respond within a Google Doc via Slack. No need to actually open that file in another tab. We all could use less open tabs. I think I have like 28 of them open right now on my browser. That's a little embarrassing, but regardless. Also, the sharing capabilities on this thing are absolutely amazing. How many times have you gotten a link, but you don't have access? When you share a link to a Google Drive file, it will automatically check for sharing privileges and can grant them in Slack. Last but not least, you can actually also see Slack activity in Google Docs. It goes both ways. The next one is a bit of an asynchronous angle on this one. Have you ever heard of the app called Message Scheduler inside of Slack? It's pretty amazing, particularly if you want to communicate asynchronously. What this app basically does, and it's very simple, it allows you to communicate across time zones while respecting the individual employee's office hours. Let's say you have a really important update that you want to schedule for everyone and you want to send out. The app will actually not ping them during the time that you send out a message that might be three o'clock in the morning. It'll actually schedule it for 9 a.m. so that they're just not overwhelmed with all the beeps and bops that exist inside of synchronous communication. You also can schedule messages to go out to a specific person or to multiple channels at different times, which is pretty cool. And you can batch your Slack time and focus time for productivity purposes, which is also really great. I know for me, I Slack zero as much as I inbox zero, and it's just really frustrating using both of those tools, particularly if you're getting messages at like eight o'clock, nine o'clock at night. We have a personal company policy that we try to get rid of those types of messages for people. So this app is amazing to be able to make that happen. And the last one that I want to talk about is Donut. We have to talk at least about one Slack integration that was entirely remote work specific. We actually use it inside of the running remote Slack channel and our community channel to be able to basically help people network and communicate a lot more effectively. So Donut is basically an AI bot that automatically connects your team members or anyone else in your Slack account, like our running remote community. Speaking of the running remote community, shameless plug alert. Have you actually checked it out? It's a monthly fee. And again, this is another message that I am giving to you guys, otherwise Igor will hurt me. It's a really great community. It is a paid community, but you should totally check it out. And inside of that community, Donut allows us to randomly connect two people together for a 15 minute Zoom call. So quite literally every week, I'm randomly connected with one other person inside of the running remote community, and we just jump on for a 15 minute Zoom call to discuss everything and anything connected to remote work, some challenges you might be happening or just in general, whatever else we want to talk about. And it's really one of the most enjoyable parts of my week. So for you guys, I mean, particularly inside of your organizations, this is so killer because we're all working remotely. We're all disconnected from each other. Getting that face-to-face communication that exists outside of your major work silos is so critical to fostering better community when it comes to remote work. So do you have any other Slack apps that would be interesting? I'd love to hear about them. Put them down in the comments below. While you're down there, why don't you actually subscribe to this YouTube channel? It is indeed free, and we talk about this kind of stuff all day, every day, every single day of the week. See you in the next video.