Botnik: This Slack bot helps your team build transparency & empathy

Build empathy and transparency with Botnik I’m happy/nervous/excited to finally put this into the world. For the past several years I have focused on helping teams. In the past, I did that by making it simple for teams to build standup meetings into their daily routines. I saw teams flourish through improved communication about tasks, but my own teams felt best when we were communicating about more than just the to-dos. Sharing more of ourselves made us trust each other more deeply, respect each other more completely, and take smarter risks together. Coupling the very smart work of scholars who study teams with my own experiences leading teams, a kernel of truth emerged: People do their best work on empathetic and transparent teams. Making sure that your team is empathetic and transparent takes a lot of your work, especially if your team is busy, remote, or growing quickly. It is easy in teams like this for people to start treating each other like resources instead of people. Botnik is a proactive tool that stimulates empathy and transparency via Slack. It automatically asks your team three kinds of flexible and carefully selected questions via Slack and displays the responses for your team on a timeline. Botnik humanizes people, gets everyone back in sync, and reveals the wisdom of diverse teams. You want everyone on your team to feel engaged and able to do their best work. Botnik helps you do that. Benefits of Botnik • Build a more productive team — Botnik improves productivity by boosting empathy, trust, and transparency. • Get targeted actionable data on your team — By regularly asking brief, easy-to-answer questions you get the perspectives you need in a timely and manageable data flow. • Get real about supporting diversity — When you don’t get to know people, you assume they are like you. • Botnik is radically transparent — Create systems and norms that generate transparency. How does Botnik do this? Questions from three targeted libraries prompt people to share identities, share statuses, and share insights. Identity questions provide a weekly opportunity to share who you are with the team. They encourage your team to share their humanity, providing the basis for empathy and authentic connection. Delight in each other’s experiences, backgrounds, and identities. Status questions provide a daily space to update the team. These questions are pre-populated with the standard standup questions. Keep your team accountable, track goals, and remove roadblocks to get everyone back in sync. Make consistent team communication automatic and share responses transparently. Insight questions provide a weekly opportunity to share wisdom. These questions ask team members what they think about important issues facing your company. Get perspectives as diverse as your team and have everyone looking out for shared values and interests. Demonstrate that you value team members’ input. Botnik’s libraries each contain more than a year of questions — updated and refreshed continuously. Re-order questions, customize questions, toggle questions on and off, and create questions to meet your needs. Timelines help teams stay connected After asking each question, Botnik shares everyone’s responses on timelines. Timelines put a familiar feed full of information about everyone in front of everyone. Built-in filters let you view responses by question type, date, or any configuration of people. Each person has a profile page, providing instant access to all their responses. Each person can also star people they’d like to follow more closely, building a custom timeline. Response rings collect and display useful data about participation For each timeline, Botnik displays a variety of response rates. Rates are displayed as rings, allowing at-a-glance review of response rates to different types of questions by different people and on different days. So you can see what fraction of each type of question an individual or team answers — allowing you to identify and support disconnected team members. By using Botnik, you can model to your whole team that you care about who they are, what they do, and what they think. You can actively lead your team to a more empathetic and transparent culture. I am eager to connect with leaders who are as excited to help their teams as I am.

I am a professor running a research lab. I use Botnik to keep my team connected and engaged. Even though I'm all over campus and constantly busy, I can stop in to the Botnik website and see what's up with everyone - what they need, whether they need support, etc. Grad school is hard and knowing my advisees and team members is helpful. It also helps them to understand each other's struggles and triumphs.

I haven't started using the insight questions, but I bet that getting my team's ideas about our research that way could be awesome.

Pros:

Botnik helps me keep in touch and connected with a team whose schedules and tasks are highly varied.

Cons:

I would love to be able to respond to people's posts.

Tim Chilcott

Botnik

Maker

7yr ago

Carlos Alberto Rodríguez

Botnik is just great!

I love Botnik because helps me to build productive teams. It's handy and customizable, I've learned a lot about my coworkers using this tool

Yes! keeping recurrent updates periodically, supporting teams and adding more features in a near future when it grows.

Amanda Stevenson

Botnik

This Slack bot helps your team build transparency & empathy

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