Do you want to get Slack updates concerning your team’s work and availability? You can do that by connecting Teamdeck with Slack using our built-in integration. In this blog post, we’ll show you how to connect these apps and set up useful Slack resource management notifications.
The Slack integration is available for all organizations with more than two Teamdeck users.
You need to have the Owner permissions to set the integration up in Teamdeck. You also have to be able to approve new apps in your team’s Slack workspace.
Head to your Teamdeck account and click on Settings in the top menu bar. Then go to Integrations where you’ll see Slack among the possible connections.
Click “Start integration”. The next step will be to allow this integration in your Slack account.
Once the integration is approved, you can go back to your Teamdeck account. In “Settings” -> “Integrations” -> “Slack – manage integration” you’ll see a list of possible notifications you can set up in your Slack workspace. Let’s go through them one by one in the next section of this blog post.
The first category of updates you can send to your Slack workspace concerns your team’s bookings. For instance, you can decide to send a Slack notification every time there’s a new booking in your team. First, you have to switch this notification on and then pick the channel where you want to receive the updates. In our case, there’s a Slack channel for PMs which seems like an ideal spot to post such updates.
From now on, when there’s a change in someone’s bookings (new booking added, edited booking, removed booking), you’ll see a note about it in the chosen Slack channel:
The second option in the “Bookings” category is sending a daily bookings summary. You have to specify the channel where you want to receive the update. Plus, you need to select the time when you want to get it.
Additionally, you can select up to three custom fields containing extra information we can add to the Slack summary. Depending on the custom fields your company uses this could be e.g. your employee’s job title.
You can also use Slack & Teamdeck integration to get quick insights into your team’s availability. When planning your employees’ work you should make sure that people aren’t overworked, but you need to also keep your eye on underutilized people—having too little to do makes people unhappy as well.
Fortunately, you can set up a weekly Slack update to see a list of people who fit certain criteria and check how much capacity they have left for next week.
If all of your employees have bookings matching their capacity, you will receive a message like this:
Weekly updates are certainly useful, but you may want to check which team members are available on demand. You can do that by switching on the “Available Resources Slack Shortcut”.
Once it’s on, you can head to Slack, start typing “/”, and then search for Teamdeck in the suggestion box.
Pick the Available Resources Shortcut and a modal will appear allowing you to specify your request – the date range you’re looking at and other criteria that might be important for you. When you complete the form, you will see a Slack message with a list of available resources and their daily capacity in the selected period.
Looking at this message, it’s easy to see that we could definitely add some bookings to Mike’s calendar or even assign him to a new project, as he seems to be completely available next week. Alice also has some capacity left.
The next couple of options available in the Teamdeck + Slack integration concern your team’s time off—vacations.
The first type of notification informs you about updates made to people’s vacation calendar—new vacations, edited vacations, removed vacations. It’s especially useful to spot vacation requests sent by your employees:
Additionally, you can decide not to receive updates about vacations added by certain people in your team. For instance, you may have an HR person who’s in charge of adding vacations to people’s calendars. By ignoring their updates, you will only see requests made directly by other employees.
Similar to the way it was with bookings, you can also get a daily summary of vacations. This is a great reminder for your team managers to see which of their direct reports are out of office. You can also set up a summary of pending vacation requests to make sure that employees are not waiting too long for a decision regarding their time off request.
The final option in the Vacations category is a shortcut. Switch it on to let your employees request vacations directly from Slack, without having to enter Teamdeck. They will just have to type “/” in any channel, then pick the appropriate shortcut—”Request Vacation”.
A modal will appear that they should fill out:
Upon submission, such a vacation request will appear in Teamdeck as a pending request. It may also appear in Slack if vacation updates are switched on. What’s important, when one of the managers changes the status of this vacation request to accepted or rejected, the employee will be notified via Slack as well:
It’s a great way to create a seamless process for handling employee time-off requests.
The final category of updates you can send to your Slack workspace via Teamdeck integration is all about timesheets. First of all, you can decide to send updates about new, edited, or removed time entries appearing in your team’s timesheets:
On top of that, you can also set up daily notifications that will remind employees to fill out their timesheets.
Using Slack for resource management can be a great way to boost your productivity and make sure no important updates go unnoticed. When combined, Teamdeck and Slack help project managers and team leaders to not only thoroughly plan their teams’ work but also monitor it in real-time without unnecessary hassle.
If you have any questions about the Teamdeck + Slack integration, drop us a line via the chat. We’ll be happy to answer your questions and help you set the connection up.
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