The best Slack standup bot for remote teams

Your search for a simple daily standup bot within Slack ends here. Kaapi is deeply integrated with latest Slack features like Home tab, reminders and channel notifications to ensure a great experience for every standup attendee.

This is how Slack daily standups work in Kaapi bot:

• Add your team members (add your entire team in one click)
• Choose a frequency of the daily standups! The default is morning 9 AM at the manager's local timezone, but you can configure custom times, frequency and cadence.
• Right on time, the questions will go to your team members who can answer the questions at their leisure.

This is why you need a Slack standup bot

• Save precious time - When 10 team members meet for a 30 min daily standup, you are wasting 300 mins. If everyone had sent their updates before the meeting, you could have used the meeting only to discuss blockers!
• Solve scheduling issues - If you are working remotely, then you very well know the hassles of trying to setup a meeting. Use async updates and throw away that pain!
• Document work - Every good remote team's superpower is good documentation (case in point, Gitlab). Putting down your team's progress, and learnings help you avoid mistakes later.

How to evaluate a good bot to automate your standups

Slack has a great app ecosystem. And you will find many options for Standup tools that integrate with Slack. It's a good thing that these tools are constantly getting better, but that also leads to a lot of confusions on choosing the best ones. Here are some important factors according to us when it comes to choosing the right standup tool for your Slack workspace:

It should work completely inside Slack

Some standup tools for Slack simply do a Slack integration where answers are posted. But your ideal standup bot should allow you to see reports, answer checkins and send reminders - everything within Slack. This way your team doesn't have to learn a new tool! 

Customisability

Every team, and in fact every project, has their own unique requirements when it comes to standup meetings. Some teams prefer short templates with just one question like "What are your plans today?" where as others prefer a longer report. Whatever your use case might be, remember to choose a standup tool that allows these customisations.

Another thing that you might want to change are the timings of the standup reminders, and the name of your team's Slack channel!

Not too spammy

Some standup tools end up bombarding the team members when the time comes. They will send messages on the team channel, private DMs and even emails! This is an absolute no-no and should be avoided

Allow for markdown editing & Slack emojis

The best Slack standup tools not only give you familiar editing shortcuts like `code_block` and *bold* but also support emojis out of the box. After all, there is no fun without emojis, right! 

Creation of reports

This is important especially if you have a large team. Every team leader and scrum master needs a simple to read overview of the standup meeting! And this is exactly why daily standup meetings are not important - you can do them in an async manner and save a lot of time. Everyone can simply read the created report and focus on the blockers.

Easy installation and use

This one is obvious! You don't want to waste hours setting up the tool, or have a steep learning curve. A good standup tool works in the background without being a burden on you.

Chat based vs form based

Most tools take inputs from team members in a chat based format, like a bot. But that can sometimes be confusing because the bots do not understand plain english fully! A simple modal form can work wonders and in my opinion is a better user experience too.

If you are in a hurry, check out some of the most popular standup templates below to simply copy paste and use!

Daily standup templates on Slack

A simple template that you can via our Slack standup bot is:

1. What did you accomplish yesterday?
2. What are you working on today?
3. Any blockers?

This is also the default template for standups in Kaapi. You can also choose from our meeting templates like:

1. Progress Problems Plans
2. Start stop continue
3. Sunset huddles
4. Daily scrum meeting template

Bonus - Break the Ice with our Icebreakers tool

Daily standups can sometimes get boring. It's the same repetitive format over and over again. Go in a circle and read out your bullet points. Half the people get bored within the first 5 minutes and switch off their cameras. If you are a scrum master, or team leader, try asking some fun Icebreaker questions like:

• What’s your dream vacation?
• Would you rather have a pet sloth or a pet parrot?
• What is the best career advice you've ever received?
• What is the last book your read?
• Favourite Netflix / Prime Video series to binge on during lockdowns?
• Would you rather have candy for dinner or have candy for breakfast?
• What apps do you use most?
• Describe your dream holiday if money was no limit?
• Do you have any Christmas traditions?
• If you could have an unlimited supply of one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be any why?

These are sure to bring a smile to everyone's face. And get them charged up for the meeting!

Tip - Want to move your standup to weekly?

You can use our Slack bot to customise your meeting routines easily to a weekly cadence, and also change questions to fit the new format

1. What are you most proud of accomplishing this week
2. What are three important things you have planned for next week?
3. Would you like to thank somebody for the special work they did this week?

Most managers and scrum masters use the weekly questions in Kaapi to help remote team members introspect on the week that went by.