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As of 2019, over 12 million people from 135,983 organizations including 65% of the Fortune 100 companies use Slack for communication. Let us learn about slack apps for employee engagement.

To start with, did you know that Slack is an acronym for ‘Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge’? Well, the full-form may not be well-known but the application itself has been gaining immense popularity as a go-to workspace messaging app.

However, just like the full form of the application, not many people are aware of the multitude of features that the software has to offer. Slack offers over 2000 integrations with different kinds of apps in its App Directory. These apps enable you to connect with tools and services without having to move out of your Slack workspace. 

While the Slack App Directory has tools for everything–productivity, project management, and collaboration, we’d like to talk about certain apps that you can use to drive employee engagement within your team using Slack. 

Before we discuss these apps, let’s quickly go over how these apps' integrations work. 

How do Slacks apps work?

As discussed earlier, Slack Apps are available in the directory, from where you can simply install them on your workspace by following three simple steps: 

1: Go to the Slacks App Directory. 

2: Find the app you want to install. 

3: Click on “Add to Slack”. 

Remember, if you’re using Slack’s free version, you can add up to 10 apps to your workspace. However, if your team is working with the paid version, you can install as many apps as you’d like!

Here’s a list of apps that we’d recommend you add to your Slack if your aim is to drive engagement and boost team morale. 

Slack apps for employee engagement and morale-boosting

1. Zonka Feeback

Make feedback collection and analytics effortless with Zonka Feedback's Slack Survey integration. Send surveys to your users and channels right within Slack, and keep your team notified at the right time.

What you can do with Zonka + Slack integration?

Send customized surveys to Slack users & channelsView real-time responses in SlackTrigger custom alerts to channels and users in Slack

2. Trivia

Do you want to keep your team spirit high and team camaraderie intact? Trivia can help teams forge stronger connections by enabling people to conduct team-building (and remote) activities and games and feel more productive.

Bring the fun back to your workspace with Trivia’s suite of games. Be it custom quizzes, word puzzles, Gotcha!, (Un)popular opinions, and virtual watercooler, spice up your workspace and make work more fun.

You can track results in real-time, along with the final podium standings showcased at the end. It also allows you to filter the leaderboard by time – weekly, monthly, and all-time – game format and category.

3. EngageWith

EngageWith is a comprehensive employee engagement platform for your team to build your DREAM company culture.

With the help of this app, employees can appreciate and recognize peers, juniors, or managers by giving them Kudos or Shout outs for a job well done. It builds stronger working relationships and a greater sense of belonging.

Every time you recognize someone, highlight the company value executed along with their achievement. This makes it easy for you to involve those who best represent the organization's values consistently.

4. HeyTaco!

As the leader, there’s often too much on your plate and it’s likely that you miss out on little victories and accomplishments that your team members achieve.

Recognizing employee efforts goes a long way in boosting engagement. HeyTaco ensures that no effort goes overlooked by enabling peer-to-peer appreciation. 

Employees can gift tacos to one another for their work and inputs, which you can later aggregate and use to reward the person with the highest number of tacos. This helps you set up an easy reward and recognition system in your team with little effort. 

5. Moodbit

Regular temp-checks on how your employees are feeling can help you gauge individual motivation levels and the general sentiment in the team. Moodbit helps you do that through its emotional analysis that’s powered by AI.

The app speech + text recognition technology analyses your employees’ emotions. In addition to that, it also has a regular pulse survey with three questions about employee motivation and engagement. 

Based on all the data collected, the app shares your team’s mood analysis with real-time analytics & insights on your team’s engagement for you to make data-driven decisions.

Using these, Moodbit also sends recommendations to your employees on its own regarding positive habits around wellbeing, productivity, and engagement like meditation practices, breathing techniques, healthy eating habits, and more inspirational content.

6. Reviewflowz

Working remotely also tends to mean fewer customer interactions for teams, especially non-customer-facing teams. Reviewflowz is a review monitoring Slack bot. 

It brings the voice of the customer inside Slack by pulling all of your customer reviews and pushing them to a Slack channel of your choosing.

Everyone can access customer reviews, comment and react, and easily decide what next steps to take if any. Bringing the voice of customers inside internal communications helps with employee alignment and engagement.

7. Giphy

As the adage goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”,  GIFs can sometimes convey your thoughts and emotions better than plain-text communication. Your Slack workspace and channels can get monotonous with thousands of messages sent throughout the day.

Giphy lets you respond to messages with an appropriate GIF from its ‘world’s largest library to add some fun. 

despicable me happy dance GIF

A little spark helps rejuvenate the mood in your Slack workspace. All you need to do is add the app and then type /giphy command along with the text related to which you want the GIF. 

8. Birthday Bot

Birthdays are the best days to make anyone feel special, especially if they’re not expecting it from you. Swamped with work and busy meeting deadlines, we often miss out on special days where we would have had the chance to make our employees happy.

slack apps for employee engagement birthday bot

Thankfully, the BirthdayBot does not let that happen to you by informing them about birthdays on Slack. It automatically records the birthdays of everyone on your team and informs people about it in advance, multiple times – a week before, a day before, and on the D-day. This way you can plan something special for your team members and make them feel valued. 

9. Aloha

When a new member joins your team, how they feel during the initial days greatly impacts their engagement with the company. In fact, a good onboarding process improves new hire retention by 82 percent.

But what if you are so caught up in an urgent client delivery that your new hire goes unnoticed on their first day and has no clue what to do? They’re likely to feel disengaged and disconnected even before their journey with the team has begun. Aloha helps you in avoiding such an oversight. 

slack apps for employee engagement aloha

Aloha welcomes the new members on Slack and helps them align with the team’s processes without any involvement from your end. It delivers pre-defined knowledge and context-setting messages in the DMs and helps you onboard them in an automated manner.

Aloha offers a lot of customization. You can set up a detailed and easy-to-navigate onboarding for your new hires in Aloha. In it, you can include the right resources, tools, and support they’d need to become effective in their job. 

10. Polly 

There’s less room for random conversations over tea and lunch breaks and times when teams work remotely. As a result, it becomes difficult to gather feedback from your team.

slack apps for employee engagement polly

This is where Polly will come to your assistance. With Polly, you can get instant feedback and send out polls/surveys that would take a considerable amount of time and effort. Additionally, you can integrate Polly with Microsoft Teams.

Over To You

All said and done, we’ve just covered the tip of the iceberg. While these 8 slack apps for employee engagement are a good start towards building your remote team, there’s a lot more to explore on the apps directory. 

The key to finding the right apps for your team is to understand your cultural goals and shortcomings first. If you think your team’s communication is getting very mechanical, trying Giphy and Icebreakers could be a good idea. If you think your team’s morale is not high enough, doing a temp check with Moodbit could be the solution.

Until you know what your remote team needs, you can install a million apps and still not get the engagement right. If you’re not sure about the right app to choose, you can also use the trial and error method and see which app integrations are actually being used and enjoyed by your team members. 

So what are you waiting for, do more with Slack slack apps for employee engagement.

Read our blog on fun Friday games for the office.

All featured images have been sourced from the respective websites of the apps.

Go a mile ahead, and check out the cool things we have added to group health insurance for your teams.