We’re incredibly excited to announce that Focus has launched the bot for Slack. It’s a big step for us for helping teams to build high-performing culture through effective scrum meetings and employee recognition.

Status meetings are a serious waste of time 

The majority of employees hate meetings. A Korn Felly survey reveals that 67% of workers say spending too much time in meetings distracts them from doing their job. On average, 15% of an organization’s time is spent in meetings.

At the same time, we see that management is changing. Frederic Laloux in his book “Reinventing organizations” describes that powered authority based paradigm evolutes to relationships and people paradigm where the more teams are lead by values and purposes, not hierarchy formal roles. Self-management companies are the next stage in management evolution. 

Companies move away from costly status meetings that people don’t like to more lightweight solutions, especially in remote companies where a team should have a high level of self-management. Building a high-performing culture is a hard deal where managers should understand how to create strong communication and processes across the company.

Focus bot for standups and employee recognition in Slack

We launched a Focus bot that brings your communication in Slack to the next level. 

After talking with many teams, we had a clear view of status meetings and communication in companies. For project managers, it’s crucial to understand what’s going on in the team each day without long meetings or Zoom calls. For scrum master, it’s vital to run daily standups and build a culture of a self-organizing team. For teams, it’s better to go away from endless meetings and to be aligned across an organization to produce the highest outcomes. 

We believe that lightweight scrum meetings (aka daily standups) are a more effective way for teams to stay in sync without wasting time. You can learn more about scrum meetings and how it works in this article.

How to install Focus bot

• Install the bot to your Slack workspace. It takes less than a minute. Just click on the button ‘Add to Slack’ and allow the bot to do its job. You should only have an account in Focus before adding the bot in your Slack workspace. If you don’t have an account, then you might sign up here and return to Slack installation later.
• Edit settings (optional). You can change the time for running standups or questions. Also, you might choose channels for reports delivery or use asynchronous standups. You can perform these and other actions in settings as an admin.
• Using the bot. The Focus bot begins to work after installation. It will run daily standups and weekly updates according to your settings.

It’s not only about scrum meetings

We believe that employee recognition is another crucial area for building a great culture in the company. And yeah, Focus bot gives you leverage for using regular opportunities for creating an amazing atmosphere in the team. It helps your employees to be recognized for their accomplishments through the Focus platform.

Read the guide to get more details about Focus bot and how it works in Slack.