We just built our first software integration. Here’s why…
“Make it easy, make it a routine.”
This is one of our core beliefs at Know Your Company. If something’s a burden, no one will do it — including you. Especially if that “something” is feedback in the workplace. Asking for and giving feedback to your team has to feel natural, easy, and be regular.
Because of this, we built Know Your Company to deliver questions via email. Email is a universal tool, in many ways. Most people use it, and you typically don’t have to teach anyone how to use it. As a result, when you use Know Your Company, it doesn’t feel like you’re using a separate piece of software… It’s feels like you’re using email.
But what if a company doesn’t use email? Over the past few years, we’ve noticed more of our customers moving away from email as a means of communication. They’ll tell us, “Hey, we actually use Slack — we don’t use email anymore.”
I hear ya 🙂
In the spirit of making it easier to ask for and deliver feedback, I’m excited to share we’re releasing a Slack integration for Know Your Company.
Here’s how it works: If your company uses Slack instead of email, you can turn on our Know Your Company Slack bot. The Slack bot sends a direct message to each person when there is a new Icebreaker or question to fill out, or when a new question summary has been delivered.
Here’s what it looks like for a team member to receive a Know Your Company question in Slack:
This way, if your company doesn’t use email, Know Your Company can still be helpful tool for you.
I won’t lie: At first, I was resistant to the idea of building a Slack integration.
I was worried that pinging people in Slack to respond to a Know Your Company question was going to create too much urgency around answering a question. One of the beautiful things about Know Your Company is that we purposefully give you 24–48 hours to answer a question before publishing the answers and sharing them with everyone else.
So if you don’t want to answer right away, you don’t have to. You can take a day or two to think about your answer, say, to a question like, “If someone asked you to describe the vision of the company, would a clear answer come to mind?”.
However, the neat part of this integration is that we designed it as “ a soft nudge.” We’re not pinging people to answer the Know Your Company question directly in their Slack channel right away. Instead, the Slack bot merely prompts you to open a browser to answer a question, on your own time – so you still have a day or two to chew on an answer to a question (if you want!).
It makes things easy, while still maintaining the integrity of the product and helping people do what they want to do.
That’s the point, after all: You’ve got to make it easy.
Big news! We’re now Know Your Team. Check out our new product that helps managers become better leaders, and get the full story behind our change.
P.S.: If you did indeed enjoy this piece, please feel free to share + give it ❤️ so others can find it too. Thanks 😊 (And you can always say hi at @clairejlew.)
