FAQs: LEAD.bot for Slack

To install LEAD, go to LEAD.app and click the “Add to Slack” button. Sign in to your Slack account. If you’re already signed into multiple Slack workplaces, you will need to choose a workplace.

Depending on your workplace’s settings, you may not be able to install bots if you’re not an admin for your workplace. If you are installing LEAD.bot without the right to create a channel in your workplace, the installation will fail. To avoid this, you will need to have an admin add LEAD, or add you as an admin.

(Please note, only 1 person in your company needs to install the app. If the app is already installed in a channel of your workplace, you can add it to a new channel or channels.) 

.

LEAD automatically creates a channel for LEAD.Bot 

LEAD will automatically create a channel called #coffee-matching as the dedicated Slack channel to use for LEAD employee matching. (If you do not want to use this default channel, you can rename the channel or create one or multiple new channels and add LEAD.bot to them)

LEAD supports multi-channel matching. You can invite LEAD.bot to any channel, such as #ChicagoYoga or #Engineer-PM-meetups, and the bot will match people within those channels.

To invite the bot to multiple channels, type @LEAD.bot, then follow Slack’s notification to invite the bot.

The initial matching channel will have a default matching time (Monday at 10 am PT), which you can change; if you’ve created new matching channels, please add matching schedules to any new matching channels you created.

Configurable settings

You can access the admin dashboard by visiting LEAD.bot’s home tab. Click the “Go to advance dashboard” button.

All available services are configurable from LEAD’s admin dashboard. We offer a free plan as well as Basic Plan at the moment to all customers. Currently, there is no difference between the 2 plans, we only charge customers based on your usage. You can use the price calculator listed below the plans, to see whether you need to upgrade, and which plan you can choose.

Announce LEAD to your team!

Your team will participate in LEAD matching by joining the channel LEAD created, so now you just need to invite others to participate and let them know that they need to join the #coffee-matching channel in order to get matched. You can announce LEAD to your team via email and/or within Slack (most people tend to post it in the #general channel or #social channel). You can just copy and paste the blurb sent from LEAD.bot right into Slack (e.g. into #general or #social). If you need an email announcement template or need to send articles to your co-workers about why meeting others is good for them, please email support@lead.app. Additionally, we’ll share some samples with you upon signup.

LEAD.bot supports all of the following in its Standard Plan.

• Admin Dashboard
• Company usage insight
• Unlimited users (based on which user seat plan you choose)
• Unlimited matching channels
• Cross-channel matching (eg. engineering meets sales)
• Fully customizable introduction messages per channel
• Introduction message templates based on use cases, such as DE&I programs.
• Matching in groups of 2 – 8 users
• Multiple schedules per week
• Each channel can have different schedules
• Custom matching schedules (multiple times per week, weekly, monthly, whatever works for your organization!)
• Skip or fast-forward a few matching weeks.
• Whether to repeat matching matched users
• Decide what user role can modify the settings
• Personal usage insight
• Manually match person A and person B, and make pairs like this as many as you want
• Each member can set their own work hours on their person dashboard (located at LEAD.bot’s home tap)
• Download matching history as a CSV file

If your organization is configured to match in groups of 2 (the default) and we encounter an odd number of users in the channel, we’ll create one match group of 3 so that all users are able to meet!

If you want to test LEAD.bot pairing feature within a few users, for example, your HR Team, you can add the HR team members to the coffee-matching channel, or invite LEAD.bot to your existing HR Slack channel. The pairing would happen only between users in the channels that the bot has been added to.

No, you don’t have to wait until next Monday. You can go to LEAD.bot’s home tab, click on the Advanced dashboard button, and if you’d like to test matching, set the matching time to 1 hour later than the current time. If you do so, you will see the matching goes out in an hour, and you can see the matching result data changing as the matching rates change in real-time (visible on the LEAD.bot home tab and the dashboard).

If you choose to do nothing, the matching will automatically happen the next Monday at 10 am with a once every two weeks frequency as the default.

1. Add the bot to a new channel:

Type @LEAD.bot in the channel you want to invite it to, then Slackbot will send you a reminder to ask you whether you want to invite the bot to the channel, click “Invite them” as the screenshot shown below:

2. Delete the bot from a channel:
Type @LEAD.bot in the channel, click the bot and choose “Remove this app from XXX channel” as the screenshot shown below:

3. If you can not find the removal option in your Slack, you will need to talk to your Slack admin, likely to be someone in the IT department of your company to help you with the issue.

Every company has faced a tremendous change in the past two years. 72% of organizations report that fostering a healthy culture drives successful initiatives and allows employees to perform more effectively during periods of organizational change.

These massive changes over the past two years have dramatically impacted company cultures, creating a very high-risk environment for employee turnover. In this article, we will talk about how you can champion company culture even in a hybrid or completely remote environment.

The Goal: Don’t leave culture change to chance — create and manage it.

“Change is hard because people overestimate the value of what they have and underestimate the value of what they may gain by giving that up.”

– James A. Belasco and Ralph C. Stayer

Everyone is afraid of change. But change is inevitable. Managers should set up clear goals and support employees through organizational change. Either from changing traditional workplace into hybrid work, or getting employees adapting to new technology tools like LEAD, that helps strengthen company culture

The steps that are critical to properly drive organizational change:

1. Quantitatively measure your current cultural values.

The first step to culture change is knowing where your current culture stands; that is, what employees believe your organization’s current values are. This will allow you to get a good idea of how much change is needed and enable accountability and the ability to track your culture change more precisely over time.

2. Intentionally align culture, strategy, and structure.

Be sure that the culture change fits with the firm’s or group’s business strategy and that both fit with the organization’s structure (its formal systems and policies). Reconsider formal reporting relationships, job descriptions, selection and recruiting practices, performance appraisal, reward or compensation structures, and training and development. Supporting change and innovation both structurally and culturally have been found to be critical to the success of culture change initiatives. Make changes where appropriate to support the new culture.

3. Ensure staff and stakeholder participation.

Change can’t succeed without the meaningful involvement of many people throughout the organization. Participation can range from individually offering ideas, solutions, and reactions to concepts, to taking part in team meetings to design and build the new culture and organizational structure. Use a balanced approach, keeping in mind that input from a wide range of people can generate excitement and motivation to change, but make sure that you have a separate change structure in place (e.g., change sponsor, change committee) that can make timely and clear decisions to prevent an ambiguous vision or delay key actions.

Let’s take implementing LEAD.bot as an example.

Yes, implementing software such as LEAD.bot could be a culture-changing activity because software is only here to support, to make your job easier but not to do the whole culture-changing work.

1. Own the change

Emphasize the importance of the change, and assign someone to be the lead.

For example, if you would like to increase casual conversations among different teams and you use LEAD.bot. First, you will need to assign a project manager to be in charge of the software. The person needs to decide what the purpose for those matches is, is it for virtual coffee, or buddy program, or for diversity discussions or all of them. Then, identify how many people in total would like to participate in the matching program.

2. Motivate Stakeholders

Once you have identified the number of different programs, then it’s time to loop in the leaders of those teams, recruit “culture champions” to run the pilot of the programs, give feedback and share feedback in writing. If the feedback is positive and can be inspiring to your overall project adoption, make it into your company newsletter and give awards/recognitions to the contributors.

3. Track progress and adapt

Keep the momentum. Every quarter or so, you can have surveys about what people think and the topics people would like to discuss. Remember, you don’t want people just to meet up for anything, because people like to have suggestions first if they are unfamiliar with mingling; it is much more engaging if you ask them to meet up with certain purposes first, no matter it is to get to know each other’s job routine to increase collaboration, or help certain ERGs to discuss topics they care. It is also important to change the purposes from time to time to keep things interesting. This means you will need to update the chatting topics or create different meet-up groups to keep things interesting. You can try some icebreaker ideas we provided here , or create periodic initiatives such as March DE&I discussion, May Executive lotteries (shuffle matching executive team/channel with non- executive team/channel), Summer buddy program for interns, etc.

4. Celebrate the wins

It is important to share positive news about the program you are running. People might experience differently throughout the program, this has something to do with luck. However, a good experience can be reinforced through story sharing. Interview your employees who have good experience with your initiative, and write it in the general channel, or share it via newsletters. Once people have hopes, the chance of winning will be much higher than just doing something like a routine.

5. Don’t Lose momentum

Even after you planned and implemented it effectively, sometimes things might take time. Many companies that go through culture changes will need a lot of advocates and culture champions to create the trends. If people hesitate to share their thoughts or meet their colleagues, then you might need to consider implementing policies that improve employees’ psychological safety.

—> recognize frustrations while keep educating people on the value and progress.

6. Believing

Organizational change takes effort and patience. The right resource investments in organizational change will lead to incredible long-term benefits.

To install LEAD, go to LEAD.app and click the “Add to Slack” button. Sign in to your Slack account. If you’re already signed into multiple Slack workplaces, you will need to choose a workplace.

Depending on your workplace’s settings, you may not be able to install bots if you’re not an admin for your workplace. If you are installing LEAD.bot without the right to create a channel in your workplace, the installation will fail. To avoid this, you will need to have an admin add LEAD, or add you as an admin.

(Please note, only 1 person in your company needs to install the app. If the app is already installed in a channel of your workplace, you can add it to a new channel or channels.) 

.

LEAD automatically creates a channel for LEAD.Bot 

LEAD will automatically create a channel called #coffee-matching as the dedicated Slack channel to use for LEAD employee matching. (If you do not want to use this default channel, you can rename the channel or create one or multiple new channels and add LEAD.bot to them)

LEAD supports multi-channel matching. You can invite LEAD.bot to any channel, such as #ChicagoYoga or #Engineer-PM-meetups, and the bot will match people within those channels.

To invite the bot to multiple channels, type @LEAD.bot, then follow Slack’s notification to invite the bot.

The initial matching channel will have a default matching time (Monday at 10 am PT), which you can change; if you’ve created new matching channels, please add matching schedules to any new matching channels you created.

Configurable settings

You can access the admin dashboard by visiting LEAD.bot’s home tab. Click the “Go to advance dashboard” button.

All available services are configurable from LEAD’s admin dashboard. We offer a free plan as well as Basic Plan at the moment to all customers. Currently, there is no difference between the 2 plans, we only charge customers based on your usage. You can use the price calculator listed below the plans, to see whether you need to upgrade, and which plan you can choose.

Announce LEAD to your team!

Your team will participate in LEAD matching by joining the channel LEAD created, so now you just need to invite others to participate and let them know that they need to join the #coffee-matching channel in order to get matched. You can announce LEAD to your team via email and/or within Slack (most people tend to post it in the #general channel or #social channel). You can just copy and paste the blurb sent from LEAD.bot right into Slack (e.g. into #general or #social). If you need an email announcement template or need to send articles to your co-workers about why meeting others is good for them, please email support@lead.app. Additionally, we’ll share some samples with you upon signup.

LEAD.bot supports all of the following in its Standard Plan.

• Admin Dashboard
• Company usage insight
• Unlimited users (based on which user seat plan you choose)
• Unlimited matching channels
• Cross-channel matching (eg. engineering meets sales)
• Fully customizable introduction messages per channel
• Introduction message templates based on use cases, such as DE&I programs.
• Matching in groups of 2 – 8 users
• Multiple schedules per week
• Each channel can have different schedules
• Custom matching schedules (multiple times per week, weekly, monthly, whatever works for your organization!)
• Skip or fast-forward a few matching weeks.
• Whether to repeat matching matched users
• Decide what user role can modify the settings
• Personal usage insight
• Manually match person A and person B, and make pairs like this as many as you want
• Each member can set their own work hours on their person dashboard (located at LEAD.bot’s home tap)
• Download matching history as a CSV file

If your organization is configured to match in groups of 2 (the default) and we encounter an odd number of users in the channel, we’ll create one match group of 3 so that all users are able to meet!

If you want to test LEAD.bot pairing feature within a few users, for example, your HR Team, you can add the HR team members to the coffee-matching channel, or invite LEAD.bot to your existing HR Slack channel. The pairing would happen only between users in the channels that the bot has been added to.

No, you don’t have to wait until next Monday. You can go to LEAD.bot’s home tab, click on the Advanced dashboard button, and if you’d like to test matching, set the matching time to 1 hour later than the current time. If you do so, you will see the matching goes out in an hour, and you can see the matching result data changing as the matching rates change in real-time (visible on the LEAD.bot home tab and the dashboard).

If you choose to do nothing, the matching will automatically happen the next Monday at 10 am with a once every two weeks frequency as the default.

1. Add the bot to a new channel:

Type @LEAD.bot in the channel you want to invite it to, then Slackbot will send you a reminder to ask you whether you want to invite the bot to the channel, click “Invite them” as the screenshot shown below:

2. Delete the bot from a channel:
Type @LEAD.bot in the channel, click the bot and choose “Remove this app from XXX channel” as the screenshot shown below:

3. If you can not find the removal option in your Slack, you will need to talk to your Slack admin, likely to be someone in the IT department of your company to help you with the issue.

Every company has faced a tremendous change in the past two years. 72% of organizations report that fostering a healthy culture drives successful initiatives and allows employees to perform more effectively during periods of organizational change.

These massive changes over the past two years have dramatically impacted company cultures, creating a very high-risk environment for employee turnover. In this article, we will talk about how you can champion company culture even in a hybrid or completely remote environment.

The Goal: Don’t leave culture change to chance — create and manage it.

“Change is hard because people overestimate the value of what they have and underestimate the value of what they may gain by giving that up.”

– James A. Belasco and Ralph C. Stayer

Everyone is afraid of change. But change is inevitable. Managers should set up clear goals and support employees through organizational change. Either from changing traditional workplace into hybrid work, or getting employees adapting to new technology tools like LEAD, that helps strengthen company culture

The steps that are critical to properly drive organizational change:

1. Quantitatively measure your current cultural values.

The first step to culture change is knowing where your current culture stands; that is, what employees believe your organization’s current values are. This will allow you to get a good idea of how much change is needed and enable accountability and the ability to track your culture change more precisely over time.

2. Intentionally align culture, strategy, and structure.

Be sure that the culture change fits with the firm’s or group’s business strategy and that both fit with the organization’s structure (its formal systems and policies). Reconsider formal reporting relationships, job descriptions, selection and recruiting practices, performance appraisal, reward or compensation structures, and training and development. Supporting change and innovation both structurally and culturally have been found to be critical to the success of culture change initiatives. Make changes where appropriate to support the new culture.

3. Ensure staff and stakeholder participation.

Change can’t succeed without the meaningful involvement of many people throughout the organization. Participation can range from individually offering ideas, solutions, and reactions to concepts, to taking part in team meetings to design and build the new culture and organizational structure. Use a balanced approach, keeping in mind that input from a wide range of people can generate excitement and motivation to change, but make sure that you have a separate change structure in place (e.g., change sponsor, change committee) that can make timely and clear decisions to prevent an ambiguous vision or delay key actions.

Let’s take implementing LEAD.bot as an example.

Yes, implementing software such as LEAD.bot could be a culture-changing activity because software is only here to support, to make your job easier but not to do the whole culture-changing work.

1. Own the change

Emphasize the importance of the change, and assign someone to be the lead.

For example, if you would like to increase casual conversations among different teams and you use LEAD.bot. First, you will need to assign a project manager to be in charge of the software. The person needs to decide what the purpose for those matches is, is it for virtual coffee, or buddy program, or for diversity discussions or all of them. Then, identify how many people in total would like to participate in the matching program.

2. Motivate Stakeholders

Once you have identified the number of different programs, then it’s time to loop in the leaders of those teams, recruit “culture champions” to run the pilot of the programs, give feedback and share feedback in writing. If the feedback is positive and can be inspiring to your overall project adoption, make it into your company newsletter and give awards/recognitions to the contributors.

3. Track progress and adapt

Keep the momentum. Every quarter or so, you can have surveys about what people think and the topics people would like to discuss. Remember, you don’t want people just to meet up for anything, because people like to have suggestions first if they are unfamiliar with mingling; it is much more engaging if you ask them to meet up with certain purposes first, no matter it is to get to know each other’s job routine to increase collaboration, or help certain ERGs to discuss topics they care. It is also important to change the purposes from time to time to keep things interesting. This means you will need to update the chatting topics or create different meet-up groups to keep things interesting. You can try some icebreaker ideas we provided here , or create periodic initiatives such as March DE&I discussion, May Executive lotteries (shuffle matching executive team/channel with non- executive team/channel), Summer buddy program for interns, etc.

4. Celebrate the wins

It is important to share positive news about the program you are running. People might experience differently throughout the program, this has something to do with luck. However, a good experience can be reinforced through story sharing. Interview your employees who have good experience with your initiative, and write it in the general channel, or share it via newsletters. Once people have hopes, the chance of winning will be much higher than just doing something like a routine.

5. Don’t Lose momentum

Even after you planned and implemented it effectively, sometimes things might take time. Many companies that go through culture changes will need a lot of advocates and culture champions to create the trends. If people hesitate to share their thoughts or meet their colleagues, then you might need to consider implementing policies that improve employees’ psychological safety.

—> recognize frustrations while keep educating people on the value and progress.

6. Believing

Organizational change takes effort and patience. The right resource investments in organizational change will lead to incredible long-term benefits.

We only support the P2P buddy program in this way:

1. Use the auto-matching function:

1.1 Create 1 channel named for example”#junior_sales “, create another channel named for example”#sales-buddy”. Then, invite people who want to have buddies into those channel. LEAD.bot will match people across the 2 channels.

1.2 If you want to have buddy programs for engineers, you can create channels called “#engineer-buddy-program” and cross match as well.

2. Use the manual matching function:

2.1 Select a mentee and then select a mentor, customize the intro-message, (save the message in your notepads), send the match out.

2.2 Use the same method in 2.1, copy the customized intro message from your notepads, and send the 2nd match out.

Yes. Once you download the software, we will send you announcement templates. For Slack users, you can also access the templates anytime through the bot’s home tab.

No, you don’t have to wait until next Monday. You can go to LEAD.bot’s home tab, click on the Advanced dashboard button, and if you’d like to test matching, set the matching time to 1 hour later than the current time. If you do so, you will see the matching goes out in an hour, and you can see the matching result data changing as the matching rates change in real-time (visible on the LEAD.bot home tab and the dashboard).

If you choose to do nothing, the matching will automatically happen the next Monday at 10 am with a once every two weeks frequency as the default.

1. Add the bot to a new channel:

Every company has faced a tremendous change in the past two years. 72% of organizations report that fostering a healthy culture drives successful initiatives and allows employees to perform more effectively during periods of organizational change.

These massive changes over the past two years have dramatically impacted company cultures, creating a very high-risk environment for employee turnover. In this article, we will talk about how you can champion company culture even in a hybrid or completely remote environment.

The Goal: Don’t leave culture change to chance — create and manage it.

“Change is hard because people overestimate the value of what they have and underestimate the value of what they may gain by giving that up.”

– James A. Belasco and Ralph C. Stayer

Everyone is afraid of change. But change is inevitable. Managers should set up clear goals and support employees through organizational change. Either from changing traditional workplace into hybrid work, or getting employees adapting to new technology tools like LEAD, that helps strengthen company culture

The steps that are critical to properly drive organizational change:

1. Quantitatively measure your current cultural values.

The first step to culture change is knowing where your current culture stands; that is, what employees believe your organization’s current values are. This will allow you to get a good idea of how much change is needed and enable accountability and the ability to track your culture change more precisely over time.

2. Intentionally align culture, strategy, and structure.

Be sure that the culture change fits with the firm’s or group’s business strategy and that both fit with the organization’s structure (its formal systems and policies). Reconsider formal reporting relationships, job descriptions, selection and recruiting practices, performance appraisal, reward or compensation structures, and training and development. Supporting change and innovation both structurally and culturally have been found to be critical to the success of culture change initiatives. Make changes where appropriate to support the new culture.

3. Ensure staff and stakeholder participation.

Change can’t succeed without the meaningful involvement of many people throughout the organization. Participation can range from individually offering ideas, solutions, and reactions to concepts, to taking part in team meetings to design and build the new culture and organizational structure. Use a balanced approach, keeping in mind that input from a wide range of people can generate excitement and motivation to change, but make sure that you have a separate change structure in place (e.g., change sponsor, change committee) that can make timely and clear decisions to prevent an ambiguous vision or delay key actions.

Let’s take implementing LEAD.bot as an example.

Yes, implementing software such as LEAD.bot could be a culture-changing activity because software is only here to support, to make your job easier but not to do the whole culture-changing work.

1. Own the change

Emphasize the importance of the change, and assign someone to be the lead.

For example, if you would like to increase casual conversations among different teams and you use LEAD.bot. First, you will need to assign a project manager to be in charge of the software. The person needs to decide what the purpose for those matches is, is it for virtual coffee, or buddy program, or for diversity discussions or all of them. Then, identify how many people in total would like to participate in the matching program.

2. Motivate Stakeholders

Once you have identified the number of different programs, then it’s time to loop in the leaders of those teams, recruit “culture champions” to run the pilot of the programs, give feedback and share feedback in writing. If the feedback is positive and can be inspiring to your overall project adoption, make it into your company newsletter and give awards/recognitions to the contributors.

3. Track progress and adapt

Keep the momentum. Every quarter or so, you can have surveys about what people think and the topics people would like to discuss. Remember, you don’t want people just to meet up for anything, because people like to have suggestions first if they are unfamiliar with mingling; it is much more engaging if you ask them to meet up with certain purposes first, no matter it is to get to know each other’s job routine to increase collaboration, or help certain ERGs to discuss topics they care. It is also important to change the purposes from time to time to keep things interesting. This means you will need to update the chatting topics or create different meet-up groups to keep things interesting. You can try some icebreaker ideas we provided here , or create periodic initiatives such as March DE&I discussion, May Executive lotteries (shuffle matching executive team/channel with non- executive team/channel), Summer buddy program for interns, etc.

4. Celebrate the wins

It is important to share positive news about the program you are running. People might experience differently throughout the program, this has something to do with luck. However, a good experience can be reinforced through story sharing. Interview your employees who have good experience with your initiative, and write it in the general channel, or share it via newsletters. Once people have hopes, the chance of winning will be much higher than just doing something like a routine.

5. Don’t Lose momentum

Even after you planned and implemented it effectively, sometimes things might take time. Many companies that go through culture changes will need a lot of advocates and culture champions to create the trends. If people hesitate to share their thoughts or meet their colleagues, then you might need to consider implementing policies that improve employees’ psychological safety.

—> recognize frustrations while keep educating people on the value and progress.

6. Believing

Organizational change takes effort and patience. The right resource investments in organizational change will lead to incredible long-term benefits.

The ongoing limited Free plan matches up to 24 people per round.

Try Standard for 14 days without a credit card. After the trial, you can keep using the limited Free plan for up to 24 people, with no time limit.

1. Find LEAD.bot in your downloaded apps, go to the advanced dashboard.

2. Accept the API permission you will see right away, and go to Subscription once you are in the dashboard.

3. Put the maximum user seat you need in the pricing calculator. Agree to the terms of service,  put down your card.

Go to the subscription tab on the Admin Dashboard, and click the “Update card”.

Try Standard for 14 days without a credit card. After the trial, you can keep using the limited Free plan for up to 24 people, with no time limit.

If you’re on a Standard Plan, active LEAD.bot users are the number of people on your billing account receiving Intros. A person only counts as 1 active user, no matter how many LEAD.bot channels they belong to.

If someone leaves the matching channel, LEAD.bot will not include the person in billing next month. They can opt back in anytime.

The ongoing Free plan matches up to 24 people per round. You can create multiple matching channels or teams, all sharing one matching schedule. Employees can opt in or out, and admins can view workplace usage insights.

Free includes 32 Watercooler topics. It remains available after your 14-day Standard trial. Compare plans for your platform to see the additional paid features.

No. We understand your financial department well and that’s why we do not charge more than you committed to pay.

Yes, we do! If you’re a nonprofit, educational institution, we may have a special plan that fits your needs. Please contact support@lead.app for more info.

Eligible Educational institutions:

• Non-profit educational institutions
• Accredited primary, secondary, and tertiary institutions

Eligible non-profit institutions must hold a valid charitable status with either the IRS (in the United States), a local tax service/charity commission, or a local TechSoup Global partner.

If you are a free Slack community (with no membership fees), such as groups for students, volunteers, minority rights, or startup communities, please reach out by contacting support@lead.app.

You can cancel your monthly subscription at any time, and you will have access to your plan features until the end of the current billing period. If you need help, please contact us at support@lead.app

Each matching round includes up to your purchased active-member limit. To include every active member in each round, choose a plan that covers them all. Contact us for help choosing a plan.

If you upgrade in the middle of the billing period (a month), then the next round match will include more active users up to the number of active users you’ve paid for.

If you downgrade in the middle of the billing period (a month), then a credit will be added to next month until it runs out or cancels.

We follow strict security protocols and strive to go above and beyond the standards in the industry. Please review our terms of service, privacy policy, and Trust @LEAD. We are in the process of getting SOC2.

LEAD.bot uses AWS as our cloud hosting provider, which offers best-in-class security. We also use Slack OAuth to sign users into our Dashboard for further security.

Our servers use HTTPS with TLS 1.3, and all of our data is encrypted. LEAD.bot is trusted by some of the largest companies in the world – ranging from Fortune 500s and cloud security businesses to government organizations.

We can also send you our Privacy and Security FAQ package upon request, please contact us at security@lead.app and we will get back to you with 24 hours! All of our customers so far are satisfied with the information and services we provide, we hope your organization would like it too!

Thank you for your interest! We are more than happy to hear that.

Annual Enterprise contracts need to have a minimum of 500 LEAD.bot users. If you’d like to discuss an Enterprise package, share some info about your team by emailing hi@lead.app or leave your name, work email, and requests over the chat on the right button corner, and we’ll get back to you ASAP.

1. Statistics show that 40% of employees feel isolated in the workplace. Enabling workplace friendships across teams helps to increase employee’s sense of belonging, increasing productivity by 3-7 times.
2. Breakdown business silos. Connecting employees for different purposes can lead to a higher employee retention rate and better internal communication.
3. Contact support@lead.app if you are interested in more insights.

(The illustration is a famous meme about different organizational cultures, it has nothing to do with guns or anything political. )

Absolutely! Many of our customers use LEAD for their remote workforce. Upon registration, we send employee engagement resources to our users in order to help leverage LEAD.bot in a way that works best for their organization. You can also take a look at our solution pages to find the use cases your company can use.

For the Free and Standard plans, LEAD.bot performs basic matching that’s partially random and partially based on a few simple parameters (such as Slack channels that users have in common).

Before the pandemic, products that introduced colleagues to each other were still in the early adopter stage and many companies did not pay attention to employee connections because it did not show a short-term impact to their organizations. However, after the pandemic, social isolation became an urgent issue for companies. In almost every company, the resultant lack of co-worker interactions showed up as lack of collaboration, productivity, or happiness.

However, a product like LEAD.bot is not just a fun tool for companies to plug in for such urgent usage. There is a lot of scientific research behind the fundamentals. We would like to share the research behind our idea of building LEAD.bot and tell you why an organization-wide LEAD.bot can actually help you to improve your company’s bottom line through facilitating connections across organizational boundaries.

If you attend HR conferences or study people analytics, you probably know that many global fortune 500 companies have people analytics departments. These companies know that they can identify true influencers and energizers through an organizational network analysis (ONA). ONAs track and map day-to-day workflows, collaboration, and expertise sharing enterprise wide, and helps to understand how an organization really works.

Before we get into why we built LEAD.bot, we would like to get into a deeper explanation of what ONA is, so you understand the idea of LEAD.bot was like a no-brainer.

Understand employee connections through ONA.

Employees are not just connected through work, but also connected through their personal social activities within the company. The various types of connections among the employees form a collaboration network, and based on how an individual is connected, their roles in the collaboration network are different.

Modern human resource researchers call the process of understanding this network, organizational network analysis (ONA).

ONA measures and graphs patterns of collaboration by examining the strength, frequency, and nature of interactions between people in networks.

ONA helps leaders find answers to the following questions: 

• How do the information and communication follow in the organization?
• How are teams and individuals collaborating with each other?
• Can we identify the most influential employees or teams and quantify their comparative impact?
• Who has been the most affected due to the pandemic?
• Are there signs of burnout?
• Are some employees at a higher risk of exit?
• Can we help employees be more productive?

Depending on the type of roles in the ONA, the way to engage and retain that types of employees is different.

Many companies such as Google, Salesforce, and Amazon did heavy studies on ONA and conclude that “ONA provides a new lens to evaluate how people show up in an organization.”

There are a couple of types of roles that are important for companies to know about, such as connectors, brokers, central actors, so-called “influencers” or “connectors”, and outliers, aka isolated employees.

• Connectors: Connectors are individuals who put in relation to many members of the network.
• Brokers: Brokers are connectors who connect different groups/teams/clusters within the network.
• Gatekeepers: Individuals who control the interactions and flow of information going to their part of the networks.
• Chokepoints: Points in the network where the flow of interactions or information is slowed down or stopped.
• Central actors: Highly connected Individuals with a high degree of “centrality”.
• Outlier / peripheral actors: Peripheral team members who have limited connections with most of the network.

As you can see from above, perhaps companies should give more recognition or rewards to the “influencers” and “connectors”, and introduce more people to the “isolated” ones. A product like LEAD.bot can help you identify the needs of the ones who love to connect with more people, encourage social interactions for the isolated ones. Not everyone in your company will enable LEAD.bot matching constantly and that is okay, as people may have many reasons not to use voluntary matching. For example, people in high demand may experience connection overload. LEAD.bot allows ways to mitigate connection overload by sharing connection requests with others around those in high demand.

While there is no easy way to virtualize the complete collaboration network even through data analysis from the communication tools or surveys, it would be great to give the power to your employees so they can choose what action to take themselves. It is important to offer the options such as virtual coffee meetups, executive lotteries, peer mentorship, DE&I discussion initiatives to your employees.

No one will use a traditional corporate social network product, that’s why we integrate LEAD.bot within your communication tools such as Slack or Microsoft teams and hope to start targeted employee matching and guided conversations. The idea for us to develop LEAD.bot is to help companies enhance their collaboration network in 6 ways below:

• Promoting rapid innovation: organizations can spark innovation by removing silos, combining expertise, and accelerating decision-making.
• Introducing new leaders: Through implementing LEAD.bot, you will be able to identify your culture champions as well as people with various talents, such as community building, people operation, storytelling, etc.
• Driving diversity, equity, and inclusion: employees who aren’t well connected in their networks may be underutilized or at risk of departure. Having ERGs or casual guided conversations to include all races, genders, identities, abilities, or other demographics, you will be able to find an emerging opportunity for the troubling patterns.
• Improving employee well-being: Well-being programs often focus on physical and mental health, but rarely attempt to address major stressors at work such as collaborative overload, or isolation. Implementing opportunities for casual peer-to-peer check-ins will not only have a positive impact on their well-being but also mitigate turnover risk.
• Leading a culture renovation: Companies spend a tremendous amount of time and effort attempting to change culture, yet research shows that only 15% actually succeed. Often, it’s because companies don’t take the time to properly identify influencers, energizers, and blockers within their workforce. By leading LEAD.bot implementation, you can identify connectors early in the process. The culture change team can build support through influencers—who may not be obvious functional leaders—and work to win over or, in some cases, work around potential naysayers.
• Managing a merger or acquisition: Unsuccessful acquisitions are often the result of poor cross-cultural strategies. LEAD.bot can help introduce the influential people within both organizations and can be engaged to act as leaders for the transition.