If your team communicates in Slack, it makes sense to schedule and host meetings there, too. Starting a meeting or scheduling one from within Slack is easy and there are several ways to do it, depending on what other apps your team uses. Even when you don’t have access to someone’s calendar, such as when you’re planning meetings with external collaborators, Slack has some elegant solutions. Here are five different ways to make meetings easier and more efficient within Slack.
Use Slack for Impromptu Meetings
As many Slack users already know, Slack provides video-calling capabilities. Free Slack users can have one-on-one calls, either video or audio, and paying members can have groups of up to 15 people on a call.
Slack’s video conferencing tool is great for impromptu meetings, but it’s missing some of the benefits you get from other video conferencing software, such as the ability to record the meeting and generate a transcription of what was said, which Zoom offers. It’s also not the best choice for very large meetings, like town halls. For these scenarios, you may need to turn to other options.
Connect Slack to Outlook to Manage Events
Outlook remains a widely used tool for scheduling meetings and you don’t have to leave Slack to use it. When you connect your Outlook Calendar to Slack, you can get reminders of upcoming events, view your upcoming events, automatically let your teammates know when you’re busy, and create new events using a shortcut button, all within Slack.
When you get a reminder of an upcoming video conference, it can include a link so that you can join without leaving Slack. You can also respond to meeting invitations, receive a notification when someone updates the details of an event, and change your RSVP.
Find a Time and Date to Meet Using a Bot
Slack is an extremely open tool in the sense that it allows nearly any company to create an integration or bot for it. Bots are extremely useful as scheduling assistants. They help you find the best time to meet among a group of people.
While there are many options, Doodle is one of my favorites. It’s a great option when you need to meet with people outside your team or organization whose calendars you can’t access to check their availability. The simplest way to use Doodle (it has many uses, really) is to create a poll with options with dates and times to meet, and people respond to it by choosing the options that work for them. As replies come in, Doodle keeps track of the most popular response. To use Doodle inside Slack, you simply install the Doodle bot. That done, you can create a poll and share it with the appropriate Slack channels or specific people.
Another similar bot is x.ai. With this installed, you use slash-commands to schedule meetings with specific people. It’s a good app, but you only see its full potential if everyone on your team uses x.ai and connects it to their calendars so that the bot can automatically check for people’s availability.
Use Polling to Pick a Meeting Time and Get Feedback
Another way to ask people when they’re available to meet is to create a poll. It doesn’t have to be specific to scheduling meetings, the way Doodle is. Using a poll might be a better option than Doodle if you don’t schedule meetings with many participants too often. Plus, a more general polling tool has other uses, too, like asking for feedback after meetings.
Simple Poll and Polly are two of the most popular polling and survey tools in Slack, though there are others. Another way to make a poll is to ask a question as a Slack post and suggest answers that match up to reacji. For example, suggest three times to meet and place an emoji next to each one, like a red dot, green dot, and blue dot. Then people can reply using the corresponding reacji. Slack automatically shows you how many people chose each option.
Get Zoom Meeting Details and One-Touch Calling From Slack
If you use Zoom for video meetings, you can connect your Zoom and Slack accounts to make the process of scheduling a meeting or launching one on the spot faster and easier. When the two services are connected, you get a few benefits. For one, you can change the default setting on the call button in Slack (phone icon) to launch a Zoom video call instead of a Slack call. Second, before you join a call that’s in progress, you can see details about the meeting, how much time has already elapsed, and who’s on the call—all right in your Slack channel. After a call ends, you can also see the call duration and participant summary in Slack.
To set up the integration between the two apps, you need to make sure you have the new Slack app for Zoom installed and not the legacy one. You also need a Pro, Business, or Enterprise Zoom account.
Get More Slack Tips
For more tips related to Slack, see our 50 Slack hacks as well as our suggestions for keeping Slack tidy so that it doesn’t get overwhelming or distracting.
