With nearly all organisations moving to Remote working arrangements, and having teammates spread across different timezones and working hours, it’s become harder for teams to stay in touch. How can you simplify remote team check-ins to keep communications open between colleagues?

Every Friday I share one of my favourite finds of the week — a website, tool or an app that has impressed me.

My Friday Favourite this week is Geekbot – Remote Team Check-Ins.

What is it?

Geekbot is a Slack (with Microsoft Teams Integration coming soon) tool that automates the process of running standup meetings, sharing responses and sharing updates between a remote team.

How much does it cost?

Geekbot is free to use for small teams of up to ten colleagues.

For growing teams, Geekbot costs from $2.50 per participant per month.

Automated Remote Team Check-Ins

I’ve written before about How changing the way you communicate can revolutionise your business.

For most organisations, however, communication is focused on external contacts — clients, prospects, suppliers and partners.

With the move to remote working, and teams working across different office hours and perhaps in different time-zones, the need for better internal communications has become even more important.

Certainly, for my colleagues within Team Tubb, we find colleagues working across three different countries and two time-zones.

This makes it difficult to organise regular stand-up meetings to help everyone stay on track.

This is where Geekbot has proven extremely useful.

Geekbot allows you to automate remote team check-ins.

After connecting Geekbot to Slack, and selecting the team members you want to participate, Geekbot will check in with them on a schedule you set.

For instance, every Monday morning (in the users local time zone) Geekbot automatically asks my team four short questions:-

• How do you feel today?
• What did you enjoy working on since (last check-in)?
• What are you working on this week?
• Do you see any obstacles in the week ahead?

Each member of the team answers, and then their updates are shared in our slack #status channel.

As a result, everybody gets visibility of what their colleagues are working on *and* how they are feeling.

Given the mental health challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the life situation it creates, these remote team check-ins can prove invaluable for managers to keep a finger on the pulse of their teams.

Geekbot helps to keep your team in sync.

As a result, we’ve found that Geekbot can help build a culture of communication across time zones, enabling you and your colleagues to stay in touch and perform better.

There are other uses for Geekbot too.

As well as being able to run weekly (or daily, or any cadence) stand-up meetings, Geekbot can also collect survey results, share responses and post any type of updates to your Slack channels at a time and a pace that suits your time.

At the time of writing, Geekbot is only available for Slack integration.

However, you can request early access to the Microsoft Teams integration, and will be notified when this is ready.

How can I get it?

To find out more visit the Geekbot website.

You can also follow @Geekbot_io on Twitter, visit the Geekbot.io Facebook page page, or visit the the Geekbot LinkedIn page.

You Might Also Be Interested In

• Right Inbox – Next-Level Email Productivity
• 15Five – Employee Engagement Software
• Sanebox – Email Management Software

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