Slack Frontiers 2020: Getting started with Workflow Builder

welcome to getting started with workflow builder i'm your host elizabeth kinsey pronoun she her i'm a senior marketing manager at slack and i run slackcommunity.com a user-led program for slack developers admins and power users i'm also a big fan of workflow builder and use workflows extensively with my team and in our community workspace today we'll be talking about getting started with workflows what they are some use cases out in the field and i'll even walk you through building a few workflows that you can take back and use with your team recapping for those of you who are learning about slack for the first time slack is a channels-based messaging platform that replaces email inside your company channels provide you and your team a shared view into the work being done because everyone in the channel has access to the same information they can work in lockstep and when new members join it's much simpler to catch up on the context they need to start working that shift to using channels as a way to keep people informed and coordinated in and of itself can transform the way you work but you can make slack even more powerful and serve your team's specific needs even better by adding custom workflows to your slack workspace and that's what we're here to talk about today there are a few different ways you can go about connecting your tools and processes to slack bringing together apps people and data in one place you can install ready-to-use apps from a selection of over 2200 in our app directory you can integrate internal tools or systems by working with your engineering team to build a custom app using slack apis or you could build no code custom workflows using workflow builder over 25 million workflows have already been launched with workflow builder you can automate tasks that involve some custom logic without writing code you can set up a workflow to kick off after a particular event we call a trigger triggers include things like a person joining a channel reacting to a message with an emoji or clicking on the shortcut menu in the message composer there are a number of triggers to choose from and we'll go deeper on triggers in a few moments once a workflow has been triggered you can add custom logic about what happens next send a message or open a form to capture more information you might want to use workflow builder like docusign did to build an onboarding workflow for new employees or to run a daily stand-up report status to a team or collect information after a customer phone call there are a lot of great use cases i find new ones every day creating workflows in slack allows you to simplify coordination and communication across teams you can reduce time to productivity create workflows that automatically route information to the right teams in the right slack channels so your team spends less time tracking down the right people to get their work done get the right information when you need it avoid delays and unnecessary back and forth by creating workflows that collect information and provide structure to that information that you're collecting and sharing so you can stay organized and accomplish your goals on your own time you can also get going quickly we know your teams need to move fast and get information across asap creating a workflow and getting your team using it in their channel takes a matter of minutes and these benefits tie together enabling your teams to get the right people the right information at the right time so your team can spend less time on the coordination of work and more time on the important work i mentioned i'm a builder i use workflows extensively on my team but especially in our community workspace the workspace is a home for our chapter leaders who run events and activities in their cities as well as our community members at large our chapter leaders have built welcome workflows of their own letting new joiners know all the important details of the local community when they join the regional channel i'm able to fulfill process requests and act on them quickly for instance we've set up a simple triage workflow for questions from chapter leaders and a feedback workflow to gather input and ideas from the community i can also add collaborators to my workflows which enables our community manager to iterate on processes even though we're in different time zones she can also access the brand new activity reporting tab to see analytics on our workflows i can also use slack connect and workflows together eliminating some of the friction of communication between the community workspace and internal slack channels for instance to process a swag request or reimbursement for a chapter leader so what is a workflow simply put workflows are the output of workflow builder a visual tool available to anyone on a paid plan that lets you turn routine tasks into automated workflows right inside of slack let's break down the anatomy of a workflow there's a trigger and there are steps that's it you can make your workflow as simple or as complex as your use case requires decide on the type of trigger to kick off your workflow add your steps and then hit publish that's it your workflow is ready to be used now i keep mentioning triggers let's talk a little more about them first up the shortcuts menu in the message composer in slack there's a lightning bolt icon users click the icon to open the shortcut menu and they'll see your workflow i use the shortcut menu trigger for things like help request channels next there's the new channel member trigger it sounds a lot like what it is when someone joins a channel you can trigger the workflow to take action like send a message to them to let them know the context of the project or the channel that they've joined another type of trigger is the emoji reaction that's when an emoji reaction is added to a message within a channel for example you could use an emoji reaction trigger to add an automatic reply in thread when a check mark is added to a message indicating a task is complete scheduled triggers allow you to schedule a workflow for a specific day or recurring time period unlocking use cases for reminders that collect information like end of quarter feedback reports incoming web hook triggers will trigger a workflow in slack from an external system or tool like an incoming support ticket or a tweet or an incident hopefully not an incident once you've decided what kicks off your workflow you can choose a series of actions that your workflow takes these are called steps that either prompt someone to complete a form or send someone a message or send a channel a message workflow builder will continue to have new triggers and steps added over time like steps from apps announced yesterday opening up new types of workflows that can be built within slack so let's take a look at some workflows in practice you can get started quickly with workflows by visiting the template library right inside of slack which you can see here pick a template customize it to your own slack workspace and then publish it to the channel of your choice you can find more templates online in our resource library there are templates in the library to help with remote work everything from reminders to drink water and walk around to collecting information to share between team members who may be in offset time zones put these pre-built workflows to interaction with just a few clicks to customize for your team we've been inspired by the workflows that our customers have created like this one from mcafee mcafee ran their first executive q a in slack using workflow builder it was really well received and we loved it so much we turned it into a template you can download the template yourself by visiting our resource library to dive a little deeper into how folks are using workflow builder to simplify and automate their work please join me in welcoming jennifer burton director engineering practices and transformation at manulife hi my name is jennifer burton and i lead up a team called engineering practices and transformation within our canadian segment technology at manulife manulife is a multi-national insurance and financial services provider manulife operates in canada and asia as manulife and in the united states primarily through its john hancock division currently i'm fortunate enough to lead a team of diverse functions that ultimately provides best practices delivery team enablement and transformation and engagement initiatives across our entire canadian segment technology with this diverse set of functions it is important to have solutions such as workflow builder in our toolbox for fast easy and secure ways to collect information and reduce the need for time-intensive back-and-forth conversations and or meetings workflow builder is great because it provides an avenue for less technical team members to within minutes spin up a workflow have it published and ultimately save hours of time-intensive administrative work for my team workflow builder is our natural first reaction go-to tool as it's easy to build and publish out it provides a really easy customer approach to answering any workflows it's built in to slack which is a tool that ultimately our team is using day in and day out and the requester or the creator of the workflow is then set up to receive data in a form that allows them to be effective i want to share a few quick and simple examples of how our team has leveraged workflow builder in this particular example i want to highlight that my team is responsible for providing a lot of employee engagement solutions as a result earlier this year we had a great idea to create customized logoed t-shirts for a specific business unit in our technology group each t-shirt had the entire business unit core logo across the chest and we were able to have each individual team customize their own team individual logo on the sleeve and this was all done early this year we used excel spreadsheets sent out by leaders to capture all of the particular size color and styles for all of the members of their teams our t-shirts were then created and we had the original approach of distributing all of these t-shirts in a fun way through the office however unfortunately due to covet hitting we know that we all had to transition to work from home so we had to pivot and find a new way to get these t-shirts sent out and distributed to all of our team members who were spread out across the country so we quickly created a workflow because we needed to have a way to capture everyone's address in a secure format so doing this through workflow builder allowed a secure way for them to provide personal information knowing that only one member of my team would have access to view this data the format of the output then allowed us to provide all of the necessary t-shirt sizing according to the name and address for each of the individuals and then it was sent to the distributor for shipping at manulife we have a culture of learning experimentation and sharing this particular example shows an intake form for an event that we have created called our canadian division technology demo days the purpose of these demo days is to allow teams who have created something new whether it be an mvp could be something that they experimented and tried or just something cool that the team wanted to work through and they have the opportunity to demo to all of our canadian division technology the cool things that they put in place so we needed a way to capture all of these new ideas and demos that teams wanted to submit to share so this workflow literally took minutes for us to create and it allows an easy way for anyone to submit their idea for their team to demo and our team can then leverage the data to manage our backlog of demos and we are able to then plan for upcoming demo events for this example there are times in the life cycle of a squad when things are progressing well and the team is just needing some heads down time so in this particular case we say once or twice a week the team may opt out of holding an actual physical stand-up meeting but they still want the ability to share and know what the other team members are doing so on the left hand side you will see we've created a workflow that's scheduled to kick off in channel every friday morning at 8 45 on the right side you will see the prompt that each team member will then receive where they're being reminded to record and share with the rest of the team in thread what they worked on yesterday what they plan on working today and if they have any blockers this allows all team members to see everyone and what they're up to in addition and moving to the bottom right of the screen you will see there's a question that also prompts them to answer if they need any help or assistance today in this particular case this is not shared out with the entire team but rather the leader is notified that someone is requiring help or needs assistance so in summary workflow builder is our natural go-to tool for so many things i will now pass this back to elizabeth where she can demonstrate just how easy creating a workflow is thanks jennifer alright let's start building if you want to build along with me you can go to your web browser and type in slack.com launch workflows this will open workflow builder directly inside of slack if workflows aren't enabled in your workspace you can go to the frontiers workspace and join testing for builders you can explore workflow builder and experiment there all right let's start building when you open workflow builder inside of slack you'll be dropped in to see all the workflows that have already been created if there are any that you've published in your workspace you can also see all of the published workflows if you're an admin we're going to go over to templates because we're going to start off with something that's pre-built and make it really easy let's set up a stand up like the one that jennifer showed us i'm going to click setup and open a modal i'm going to adjust the date and time so that it matches when i want my workflow to start this is going to be for a project that happens in mid-october so we're going to start our stand up on the 12th i'm also going to change the time since i have teammates in different time zones we're going to have this go out at 7am that way it'll hit some people at the end of their day some people at the beginning some people in the middle i want this workflow to run monday through friday so under frequency i'm going to select every weekday monday to friday you can see there are a couple of different options and even a way to make it custom once i've selected the frequency the date and the time i'm going to click next this opens up the workflow with the trigger and the step now all i need to do to make this for my workspace is to edit the step i'll click the edit button and i'll choose the channel that this is going to go to i like to send most of my workflows to a test channel before i send them to a live channel just to make sure everything goes how i want it to so i'll send this to test elizabeth i'm also going to update the message text like i mentioned all my teammates aren't in the same time zone so i'm not going to say good morning i'm going to say hi team i can also use emoji and format the message the same way i would any slack message so let's add a little wave i want to make sure this is bold because it's kind of important and this looks pretty good to me i could preview all of the message contents in the preview window like i said looks good so i'll click save all right it's ready to publish now it's ready to use that's how simple it was to set up a stand-up workflow now you'll see in this modal that it suggests that i test this workflow out if i was using this in real life for a scheduled trigger i'd want to set the test up for a time that i'd be able to see it but i'm pretty confident this will work so i'm going to close this out now that seemed pretty easy maybe too easy let's try another one if you want to access the workflow builder within slack click on the name of your workspace tools and then workflow builder it'll open the same window that you were in before you can see my team stand up that i published just a second ago is in the menu but we're going to create another new workflow this time let's go for the shortcut menu trigger here's a workflow that uses the shortcut menu trigger i know because the icon is there it's a way to triage requests so let's set it up the first thing i need to do is decide where this workflow will live in the channel and again i'm going to send it to my test channel so that i can make sure everything works before i make it live for my teammates i'm going to give it a short name this is really important think about what you want to name your workflow because this is how people will find it in your menu you want to make it something that's memorable enough for users to remember what it does but that's short enough to fit the character limit this seems like a pretty good suggestion request help i'll use that thanks slack i'll click next and just like magic all of my new steps appear i just need to customize first let's take a look at the form i'll click edit and take a look at the different details and questions that are here i'm happy with the title of the form but i could change it if i wanted these questions look pretty good to me but i want to make sure that the summary of my request is going to be long enough for someone to fill out i'll click the edit icon the little pencil and choose the question type i'm going to change it from a short answer to a long answer but you can see from the list that i could have a number of different options i could select a channel or a dm i could select a person or i could select from a list we'll change it to long answer and i definitely want it to be required so i make sure that's checked i think the urgency is a little bit more important so i'm going to bump that up by clicking the arrow this all looks good to me i'm going to click save now the meaty part i'm going to change the message that i'm actually going to send out to the channel i'll click edit here the first thing i want to do is make sure that it's going where i want the message to go in this case i do want the message to post in the channel where the workflow started so i'm going to leave that but you can see from the drop down menu that i can make a number of different selections i'm going to update the text using the wysiwyg editor and i'm going to do one more thing now this isn't something that you have to do but this is a best practice that i like to do because it makes a little bit easier to manage my variables i'm going to change the label of the variable the variable is what was input in the form i'm going to click into the variable name and update it i like to label it the same as what it will label in the message just to make it easy to pull it out when i'm pulling the variables in let's change the name of the variable for each of these now this is an interesting one to point out when you're using the variable of the person who clicked a request help or any time that you're actually using a variable that relates to a person you can choose to at mention that person to use their name or their email you can even do all three if you wanted to collect this information save for a form that you're using to send out swag we're going to keep it at mention because i want them to get a notification let's change this to category and finally to the details now the really cool part about this is i only have to change the label on the variable once it'll hold for all the rest of the times i'm pulling this information in you can see here that the message is previewing looks pretty good to me i'm going to click save the other thing that i want to edit is the message that's going to the person who submitted the form i'm going to click edit again i want it to go to the person who clicked request help and this looks great to me but i want to add the details of the requests that they made i find it useful for people when they have questions that they can go back and refer to what they already asked or what they already told me so i'm going to go ahead and insert this variable i'm going to add the request and i'm going to add the urgency and i'm going to add the details as well as the category and i'm going to give it a little bit label of a label so that it shows up in the message and just so that they know what i'm sending them i'll add a little note that says here are the details of their request you can see everything is populated here in the request manager preview and it looks good to me i think i want to do one more thing just to make something stand out i'm going to make that bold and i'm going to set it into a block quote all right looks great i'm going to click save now you might be tempted to publish this now but there are a couple more things that you can do to make your workflow even better and to work better for your team the first is to update the settings you're gonna change the icon now when you're running one or two workflows it's fine to use the default but if you have four five six seven it's great to be able to at a glance know which workflow is which just by the icon let's change this to say help all right just like that i've got a pretty little icon for my workflow i also want to add a collaborator like i mentioned before adding a collaborator means that other people can work on your workflow make updates and look at the analytics let's click on manage and i'll add our community manager needs great now neve has access to this workflow and can make updates even if i'm not around all right this all looks great to me my workflow looks good let's hit publish all right i got the confetti my workflow is ready to use let's give it a test okay here we are in my test channel you can see here there's a notice that says that i've added it i'm going to click on the shortcut menu you can see request help is a workflow that's been added i'll click there the help desk request opens i'll fill out the information it's not urgent and but if i needed to i could make it urgent and there's nothing else that anyone needs to know about this request right now i'll click submit and there it goes posting in the channel you can also see i have a message from slackbot with the same details of my request i hope you're inspired to build your own workflows there are a few more ways to learn about workflow builder first i would love for you to join slack platform community visit slackcommunity.com and find your local chapter or join the global chapter once you join you'll trigger an invite to our community workspace where you can join the workflow builder channel to get connected to other slack builders and even a few members of the workflow builder team you can also join the session later today where you can build along with a workflow builder designer and engineer to code a workflow step we'd also love for you to explore the template library get inspired by our customers and partners and the templates that they've created and find a workflow to customize your own team and if you're an engineer check out some of the pre-built templates we've designed to help you with your daily work there's actually more than six now before we go i wanted to thank jennifer for sharing how manulife is using workflow builder it's really exciting to see how many cool things customers are doing and i want to thank you for joining us today to learn more about workflow builder i hope you're inspired to start automating some of your routine work right inside of slack i'll see you in channel

Channel: Slack

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Length: 26min 0sec (1560 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 20 2021