Slack integration

What changes once Slack is connected

Teamtopia already knows who is off, when, and how many days each person has left. The trouble is that this lives in a web app your team opens a few times a year. Connecting Slack moves it into the place where the work actually happens, and the difference shows up in small daily ways rather than in one big one.

Nobody has to ask who is away

When someone's time off begins, their Slack status changes on its own: a short line of text, an emoji and an expiry so it clears itself the day they are back. You find out a colleague is on vacation before you write to them, instead of two days later when the reply still has not come.

The one exception is workspace owners and admins. Slack does not let any app change their profile, so they still set their own status by hand.

The channels you choose also get warnings in advance: who is going away and when, whose vacation starts tomorrow, what is coming next month. Planning a sprint or a release stops depending on somebody happening to remember.

Requests stop getting stuck

Every request — vacation, sick leave, a day off, a holiday swap — can be announced in the channel where the people who approve it already are. They see it as it arrives, and the employee sees the decision in the same place, without a separate email nobody opens.

And when nobody answers at all, Teamtopia says so. Once a request has been waiting more than two days, the people who can decide get a private message with a button that opens it. Not a public reminder in a channel, which would embarrass somebody into a rushed answer — a quiet one, and anyone who finds it annoying can switch it off for themselves.

This is the part that changes the numbers. Most delays in approving leave are not disagreements. They are requests nobody noticed.

Everyone can see their own balance

Anyone who opens Teamtopia in the Slack sidebar sees what they came for: how many vacation days they have left, when their next vacation starts, which public holiday is nearest. Two buttons sit underneath — create a request, or open the full dashboard.

"How many days do I have left?" is the question HR answers more often than any other. After the integration, people answer it themselves, in a few seconds, in their own language.

Every channel hears only what it needs

There are seven kinds of notification — vacation, sick leave, day off, holiday swap, public holidays, birthdays and the end of probation periods — and twenty-four separate switches inside them. The settings belong to the channel, not to the workspace.

So a general channel can carry birthdays and public holidays and nothing else. An HR channel can carry requests only. A team channel can carry its own people's vacations. Nobody ends up muting the app to escape somebody else's notifications, which is how most Slack integrations quietly die.

It speaks in your team's words

Every message is a sentence you can rewrite. Teamtopia fills in the parts that change — who, which dates, how many days are left before it starts, the name of the holiday — and the wording around them is yours, in whatever language your team works in.

That includes the holiday and birthday greetings. It is a small thing, and it decides whether the messages read as part of the team or as a robot in the corner of the channel.

Getting started

Install the Teamtopia app in your Slack workspace. It brings in your members with their names, avatars and email addresses, and matches them to people in Teamtopia by email. Anyone it cannot match, you match by hand in a click, and bots or accounts you do not need are ignored. Then pick the channels and switch on what each one should receive.

People can also sign in to Teamtopia with Slack, so the team does not need to keep another password.

What the app can and cannot see

It sees who is in the workspace — names, avatars, email addresses — and which channels exist. That is how it knows who is who, and where it is allowed to post.

It cannot read your correspondence. Not in channels, not in direct messages, not even in the channels it posts to itself. It never asks Slack for access to message content, so it does not have any.