If you are working remotely, like us at Steer, you’ve probably replaced the email for Slack to chat and collaborate with your team. Although Slack has its downsides — notifications, real-time, urgency — it is the best way to substitute those old and tedious email threads. Remote teams need the water-cooler conversations that non-virtual teams have, but these don’t happen by email.

Building strong ties between peers is one of the main challenges that remote teams are facing, together with creating and maintaining a healthy company culture and boosting transparency to keep everyone aligned. How to overcome these challenges?

Team management made easy through Slack

When teams are small, working together is easier. Everyone knows what they should be working on and if they don’t, they just ask. Daily stand-ups are fast and productive, and you, as a manager, have constant feedback from the rest of the team.

But as companies grow and move out of one room, teams get siloed and individuals get lost. Communication and alignment get harder, calendars start to be overbooked with meetings and demotivation steps up.

Team management tries a variety of quick fixes — email status updates, task management tools, all-hands calls, manager meetings — to maintain transparency and keep everyone aligned. But things still get lost and employees get frustrated, with less time to work because of the new meetings and tasks piling up.

The solution we propose is not a quick fix. Is a regular and constant conversation. Imagine ending your week by reading all the feedback, progress and goals achieved from your team members, and act on it. Imagine knowing when and how do you need to coach your team members, and clear roadblocks. Imagine being able to delete the daily stand-up meeting from everyone’s calendar, and give the time back to the team.

Because we believe in well-integrated solutions, we are excited to bring our daily stand-ups and one on one check-ins into Slack, the place where communication happens.

How it works

Using Steer within Slack is easy and painless. You just need to go to your Steer’s profile (in your dashboard), and sign in with Slack.

Once registered and connected, your team members will receive the questions through Steer’s slack bot with the cadence you have configured. As simple as that.

Our goal is help you reduce the number of meetings, and collect frequent feedback from your team. But this is just the beginning. We’re continuing to deepen our integration with Slack to include everything, from continuous feedback to weekly check-ins to goals and we’ll be sure to update the community as we make progress.