Get more done each day with our favorite automation tools for Slack

Workflow Builder is Slack’s built-in point-and-click tool to let you automate repetitive tasks, like fielding requests or onboarding new teammates. These workflows can be triggered by someone joining a channel or marking a message with a specific emoji reaction, at a specific time, or from the shortcuts menu. A series of steps follow, like prompting a user to complete a form and then posting the results to a designated channel.

With our recent improvements to Workflow Builder, you can also automatically route responses and data out to tools like Jira, Salesforce, Google Sheets and Trello, or have updates from these apps sent into Slack. There’s no need to open another window or app because it’s all done automatically. Instead, your team can remain focused on its most important work, where everyone works best: in Slack.

The Slack developer community is hard at work updating apps to support Workflow Builder steps, and our team already has a handful of notable favorites. Add them to Slack from the list below, and read on to learn more about the automation each unlocks.

Streamline common tasks in the workplace

A frequently asked question about Workflow Builder is what you can do with any text or data you collect in a form. Let’s say you have an “Update your mailing address” workflow in Slack. By using Google Sheets for Workflow Builder, responses can be recorded as new rows in a spreadsheet, instantly.

For teams that manage a slew of projects, Workast, Workstreams and ToDoBot each offer workflow steps that create new tasks and to-do items automatically from Slack. If you’ve built a request workflow, you can send those requests to the appropriate team channel while simultaneously creating a new task in the team’s project management system of choice. When it’s time to discuss the status of those projects, a workflow step from Fellow can post agendas to the team channel in advance of the meeting.

Shortcuts to help your engineering team maintain focus

When your engineering team is resolving an incident, every second matters. Juggling multiple apps and windows—and the time it takes to refocus—saps plenty of them. With workflow steps for PagerDuty, Jira and Datadog, engineers can take that time back.

For example, if your team builds a “Report incident” flow in Slack to declare an outage, the “Trigger PagerDuty incident” step automatically creates a new incident in PagerDuty. The same goes for any software team that builds a “Report a bug” workflow. Using Integration+ for Jira, the bug will be logged as a new Jira ticket instantly—no additional forms or actions needed.

As your team swarms an incident or issue, Datadog’s new “Share dashboard widget” step lets you post real-time graphs to Slack. This way, new teammates can quickly get up to speed without switching tools or interrupting others.

Check your team’s pulse with surveys and polls

Polls and surveys are a great way to monitor your team’s happiness and improve team culture, especially in times of increased remote work. Say you’d like to quickly get everyone’s thoughts on a recent string of meetings. A new workflow step from Polly makes this simple, sending templated forms to attendees. Looking for more lightweight feedback? Add a Simple Poll step to the end of your feedback workflow, which prompts attendees to rate the meeting.

Automate all the things!

If none of the prior examples is quite right for the tooling and automation needs of your team, don’t fret. Both Zapier and Automate.io act as an interface to hundreds more apps. Either can send data from Workflow Builder forms to tools like Salesforce, Outlook, Office 365, Trello, Asana, Airtable, Twitter, HubSpot, GitHub and more.

So whether you’re looking to streamline requests, submit reports or create new tasks in other apps, Workflow Builder lets your team do it all without leaving Slack. Not sure where to start? Visit our example library to find popular, pre-built workflows that your team can implement with ease.