Team Engagement, Randomly Pick a member in Slack

Increasing team members’ engagement in meetings & discussions can be challenging, especially since many companies are practicing work from home in response to this pandemic. It’s not hard to spot the ninja members who are quiet in most of the meetings.

Have you ever found your team in a situation where you wanted to push those quiet members to engage more often in discussions, leading a meeting, or giving a presentation? What do you usually do in such times?

Or maybe you wanted a more fun way of starting your scrum meetings by randomizing the first person who speaks?

In our case, we’ve definitely tried giving round-robin, a try. to be even more simultaneous, we’ve tried random pickings too. 

I literary can remember our PO doing a Google search for a Random Picker online to pick a name for something we were up to in a screen share. 

So last night when I finished work, I decided to make this a bit easier for us, and maybe anyone else who uses Slack in their company by creating Random Member.

Random Member is a tiny Slack application that creates a command called /random, which you can run from any channel and group chats. 

To add this app to your workspace simply open the Random Member landing page and hit Add to Slack button.

It took me one day to build and deploy Random Member, I’m looking forward to seeing it in the Slack App Directory and get your feedback!

PS: I’ve tried to make sure everything works as expected, but I’d love you to break my app. if you find any bugs please let me know to fix them.