Why Executive Assistants Love Slack Office Management Bots

As an executive assistant, you’re probably often on the lookout for innovative ways to increase productivity and reduce the mundane tasks that take up so much of your day. If your company uses Slack as a communication and collaboration tool, today is your lucky day!

We’ve put together a list of office management bots that you can integrate into public and private Slack channels to help streamline a variety of office management tasks and executive assistant duties, including scheduling, project management, reporting, and other miscellaneous office tasks.

Scheduling and Calendar Organization

If your office management duties include scheduling events and keeping the executive management team’s calendar in order, simpler days are here! 

Using integrations with Google and Outlook calendars, EAs can use the integration to view schedules, respond to events, create and receive event reminders, and use a shared calendar for an entire team within Slack. 

There are also meeting bots to find available rooms and easily schedule office meetings, view a person’s availability, and ‘nudge’ someone if they are late to a meeting. If calendar management and meeting planning is a big part of your task list, Slack bots can support you in streamlining your To-Do list, and take a major piece of it off your plate.

Expenses and Purchasing

Whether you’re submitting expense reports, making big purchases for the office, or downloading financial reports and documents, many of these routine tasks can be done by various bots in Slack. 

For example, EAs can install ExpenseTron, a bot that allows you to drop bills or receipts through a direct message. This feature will then categorize them, file them, and send them to the appropriate department or individual for approval.

If you spend a lot of time filing expense reports and trying to keep track of the purchases you make on behalf of an executive, there are many bots that can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

Project and Task Management

As executive assistants become more involved in company projects and task management, tools and resources that set them up for success are more than welcome in an EA’s toolbelt. 

If you need to track or log the time your team spends on a project, there’s a helpful bot called Harvest that can do this for you. Meanwhile, the Workstreams bot provides an organized way to create and send tasks within Slack, track progress on various projects through Kanban boards, access visual data to see where you’re spending time, and even identify tasks that need to be completed. 

A Few Extras

• Track your FedEx, UPS, and USPS deliveries from Slack with Backtrack. Simply type the command ‘/backtrack’ and enter any tracking number, and you’ll receive updates on shipping and estimated arrivals.
  
  
• Birthday bots collect everyone’s birthdays through Slack, so you don’t have to worry about keeping track of each individual member’s birthday.
  
  
• OfficeAmp reduces the emails and messages that admins and EAs get regarding office requests by answering as best it can and creating a ticketing system to help you prioritize what needs to be answered by which department. With Office Amp, there’s no more hunting down individual answers on your own.

For more apps and bots that help level up office management processes, check out this comprehensive list. 

Using Slack and the apps and bots available within the platform, executive assistants can leverage their hard-earned skill sets to be an asset to any team. With mastery of these tools, you'll be on the fast track to major career success as an executive assistant.