Fixing our biggest mistake

What’s your biggest mistake?

I ask this question myself a lot. I genuinely love doing retrospectives. I do one every day. On top of that I also do weekly retros, and monthly ones, and quarterly ones, and sure thing I do my annual retro sometime in late December. You get the point.

Reflecting so much on what I did well and what I could have done better makes it actually hard to pinpoint a single specific action that I regret. There is a fair number of them. But when it comes to building Teambit, I think my biggest mistake was not starting out by building a Slack bot.

Several years back, after struggling with understanding and developing the team in our previous startup, myself and Bohdan realized that the problem was bigger than just us. We are all experiencing what Gallup calls ‘an employee engagement crisis’ with just a third of people engaged at work.

Most of those problems are due to the lack of recognition, opportunities to speak up and clarity on how to grow. Regular feedback is key for solving that, yet it’s not a part of a daily worklife, since it’s hard to share it. Existing processes, like annual performance reviews, one hundred question surveys and random feedback are outdated, hardcore and disconnected. So feedback is not shared, lacks context or is forgotten by the time the person is formally evaluated. Thus leaders who don’t embrace this change end up with misaligned, disengaged and dwindling teams.

We wanted to see a different future. A holistic solution for all of engagement and performance management challenges of a team. A solution that would send contextual suggestions at the right moment, so that people never forget to share regular feedback. A solution that would be a source of record for all the engagement and performance data over time, so that people could have a comprehensive understanding of everyone’s engagement and performance. A solution that would enable a safe, lightweight and fun environment to speak up, so that everyone could quickly and regularly share their thoughts.

With that vision in mind, we decided to build a standalone platform to do all of that. Yet ever since launching we’ve been getting constant questions about Slack.

It was obvious we had to be accessible in a place where people already were spending their workdays.

That’s what we are doing today by releasing our Slack integration.

Rooted in the the latest research in behavioural science, positive psychology and social cognitive theory, Teambit helps you to understand, develop and retain your team by making feedback a daily habit. This way everyone can feel heard, recognized and clear about what to improve.

Here are a few things you can do by connecting Teambit with Slack.

Receive notifications about new feedback, praise, requests, surveys and reviews

Whenever one of your teammates requests or sends feedback, you’ll see it in a direct conversation with our bot and will be able to react to it.

And when feedback is added to praise, it will show up in a public channel, so that everyone in the team can celebrate it together.

Send and request new feedback with slash commands

On top of that you’ll be able to send and request feedback from your teammates by using /send-feedback or /request-feedback slash commands.

Frictionlessly onboard and maximize adoption by your team

We’ve actually quietly introduced Teambit’s integration with Slack to existing customers in the last couple of weeks and we’ve seen an increase of up to 30% in team participation compared to teams depending on email.

Create a high performing team culture right from Slack

Give the new integration a try by signing up with Slack. It would only take seconds to get started.

If you have a second, come join a discussion about Teambit for Slack on ProductHunt 🙌