Top 10 Slack Apps For Remote Workers

86% of knowledge workers are working remotely now, and 60+% want it to stay that way. 

Slack has become the hub of remote work for many companies, but its value is really unlocked when you start using the universe of thousands of Slack Apps to make Slack more powerful.

As a growing company ourselves, we think the right software will help us scale when we can’t be in the same room together. That’s why we’re pleased to share with you what we consider to be the top 10 apps on Slack for remote workers. Let’s dig in.

Donut

Communicating by Slack is easy, but building rapport between remote workers is another matter. That’s where Donut comes in. This app creates conversation starters and social opportunities within Slack itself, making sure that your remote team builds the kind of bonds they would in an office. If you want to introduce a new member of the team, you can have an ice breaker round in which people answer a fun question. You can start mentoring and shadowing programs between employees. Your team can do all of this within the same space they work in, creating a more hospitable and enjoyable environment to be in. By the time you all finally meet in person, you’ll already be close friends.

Loom

Loom is a video messaging platform that gives your team the ability to communicate in more than just text. You can record yourself as you share your screen, then share the video of your presentation directly within Slack. It’s great for asynchronous communication that needs deeper nuance than chat, or for communicating with customers. Best of all, it flows naturally in a Slack channel with the Loom app for Slack.

Wrangle

Wrangle is a workflow engine built right inside of Slack. We all know that Slack can become pretty chaotic when your team channel becomes an inbox of requests for help from other teams. Messages pile up and you’re sure work is dropping through the cracks. Wrangle fixes this problem, letting you easily create and manage recurring approval workflows and help tickets from other teams in your busy Slack channels. They choose what they want help with, like employee onboarding, approvals, marketing collateral, engineering escalations, and more. You can design forms to collect all the information your team needs and then when filled out, Wrangle sends approvals and tasks to your Slack channel and notify specific people that there’s work to be done. They can approve the request or complete the tasks with buttons in Slack, so they don’t have to go to an external web app. Best of all, everything is tracked so that managers can see all the inbound work and make sure that those assigned actually get it done. 

Polly

Polly is a simple survey tool operating entirely within Slack (though they also integrate with other platforms, like Microsoft Teams). Why polling? It’s a quick way to gauge the feelings of your team without forcing them to use another platform. You can poll employees to get a consensus on a particular project, when to set up a new recurring meeting, or even when to have the draft for your company’s fantasy football league. Polly also has a number of templates you can use while you customize some of your own forms. If you need to collect feedback from large groups of people, then this is an easy way for you to get it.

Google Drive / OneDrive

Google Drive and OneDrive are excellent file storage platforms that serve as the basis for their host companies’ online workspaces. We love their respective integrations with Slack because of how they improve upon the experience available on those platforms. 

Google Drive’s integration allows you to share files and leave comments on them within Slack itself. You can reply to other people’s suggestions within a Slack thread as opposed to opening that particular file on your browser. If you can’t remember the name of the file, you can always use the Slack search bar to find it. OneDrive’s integration doesn’t allow you to edit files within Slack, but you can still preview and share them, as well as adjust people’s security access. 

Salesforce

Salesforce is one of the most powerful customer relationship management tools on the market, and its Slack app delivers some of its best features to your conversation threads. You can get notified when a customer record is updated, search for items in Salesforce using Slack, and send records from the CRM to teammates in your threads. You can get most of the information you’re looking for without having to switch platforms.

Slack for Outlook / Slack for Gmail

Slack’s apps for Outlook and Gmail both allow you to share emails you receive within Slack itself. To get a better sense of why that helps you, picture the following scenario. You just received an angry email from one of your biggest clients, and they’re considering taking their business elsewhere. The Slack apps will allow you to share that email within a conversation thread so your team can weigh in on the most appropriate way to respond. This will keep everyone organized, on the same page, and (hopefully) allow you to retain a client.

Giphy

We admit it: there is no professional reason to include a GIF program in Slack other than the fact that we love GIFs. Who doesn’t enjoy using the Carlton dance to respond to good news someone posted in the chat? Giphy adds an element of fun to work conversations that don’t always lend themselves to entertainment.

LiveChat

LiveChat is a fantastic chat tool for websites. Slack’s integration allows your team to talk to website visitors within Slack itself, and they can also send files to potential customers from within the platform. LiveChat’s app also tracks how your team communicates with website visitors so you can use high-quality data to figure out how best to talk to people in the future.

DocuSign

Do you enjoy printing a PDF, signing it by hand, and then scanning each page back to your computer? Neither do we. Thankfully, the DocuSign app allows you to sign forms on the computer and send them directly back to your team or client. You can even get pinged when someone finally signs a document you were waiting on. It only seems like a small benefit until you use it, then you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.