Slack today announced four new features - Slack Huddle, voice and video recordings, scheduled send, and Slack Atlas - to be rolled out over the next weeks and months. These features will be automatically included for paid Slack teams with the possibility they may make their way to free Slack users in some way in the future.

The four new features all circle around Slack's vision for the future of working. The organisation put significant thought into the best way to replicate the effectiveness of water cooler or hallway style conversations while remaining friendly to colleagues distributed across many different countries and timezones and while avoiding the route of making yet another real-time video conferencing platform and further punishing today's workers with non-stop meetings that leave no time to actually do the work we spend so much time talking about.

Slack says every organisation must decide for itself what mix of in-person, remote, or hybrid working suits its needs. While there is no one-size-fits-all it is clear businesses will need to adopt a digital-first approach to work that employees now demand. Importantly, Slack sees digital-first as more than taking the old ways of rigid nine-to-five workdays packed with countless meetings; instead, Slack's vision is synchronous and asynchronous, in-person and remote, structured and informal conversation and collaboration. The three new features promote this, providing flexibility and inclusion.

Slack Huddle

Slack Huddle is designed to recreate in-between moments, those opportunities for casual conversation and insights that arise outside of scheduled meetings. It's the digital equivalent of dropping by a co-worker's desk to hash out an idea or spontaneously speaking in the corridor. With one click a huddle can be started in any channel or direct message (DM), including those you share with folk outside your company.

Everyone participating in that channel can come in and out as they please. While you can share your screen during a huddle, the idea is to take a break from being on camera and instead casually discussing a complex topic on the fly without trying to negotiate calendars.

Slack Huddle has been piloted with 100 customers over the last five months and is now in general availability, to be fully rolled out to paid Slack teams worldwide in the next few weeks. Slack reports its pilot customers enjoyed the voice-first approach of walking through a design or screen share in a way that's inclusive and accessible from the beginning. It provides a quick sense of co-working, it includes live captions allowing anyone to follow along with text even if they aren't in a position to have their volume turned up, and it works with one click on any device.

Video and voice recording

The second new Slack feature flips meetings - those endless video-conferencing meetings in which many participants didn't even need to be there - to asynchronous sharing of ideas. This feature provides a new way to easily create and share video, voice and screen recordings in Slack.

With this feature, paid Slack users can now share their updates or ideas, contributing to the conversation, in their own time. This might be the daily standup, for example, for a distributed team in different countries. There’s no need to coordinate calendars or schedule a full meeting to show a set of slides.

When a recording is shared in Slack, everyone can watch whenever and in whatever way works best for them. To help, Slack has updated its video playing facilities to include speeding up and slowing down video content as well as reading through a transcript. If the recording was made in Slack the transcript is archived with the video and is searchable through the usual Slack search features.

Scheduled send

Additionally, you can schedule your recording and traditional messages to go out at a time convenient for your audience.

These three new features make it simpler for far-flung teams to work together without the constraints of endless meetings. Instead of the loudest voice on Zoom getting airtime, everyone can get the airtime they need, and the team can resolve its synchronous goals with asynchronous processes.

Slack Atlas

The fourth new feature Slack is introducing is Slack Atlas, a visual directory of teammates. It may be easy to connect the world but often it’s hard to connect to people in your own company. Slack Atlas provides enhanced profiles and will launch in Australia and New Zealand later in 2021.

Slack Atlas includes rich, dynamic information such as the organisation structure, start dates and custom fields. It also integrates seamlessly with products such as Workday so profile data is automatically populated and remains up-to-date.

This is the future of work as Slack sees it, and these new tools will surely be welcomed by those burned out by scheduled video meeting after video meeting. These new features bring casual conversation and asynchronous updates, combining them with the existing richness and power of Slack’s archiving, searching, and channels.

More details are online here.

Slack has also gathered a selection of tips and advice on supporting workplace collaboration, gathered from Slack customers like Expedia, Zillow, and Up.