Slack huddle — Yay 🙌 or Nay 🤦🏻‍♂️

Another one joins the Clubhouse party 🎉 — this time it’s Slack!

Slack launched huddle as a collaboration tool & positioned it as a tool to recreate the spontaneous and informal discussions that you miss from the office — the digital equivalent of a tap on a colleague’s shoulder, or watercooler chat.

On desktop, you can join a chat by entering into a channel or DM and click on the headset toggle. There will be a “Bloop!” sound to indicate that a Huddle has started.

Why it will work?

• Placement is unobtrusive, sitting in the bottom left corner of the window.
• Occupy only the left corner of the window & thus it doesn’t disturb the context by occupying full screens like Google Meet or Zoom.
• Helps to kickstart quick conversation which is being discussed over chat to audio without having the need to negotiate the google calendar and schedule the meetings.
• Solves business use case nicely through options to share your screen or even turn on live transcriptions.
• Anyone on that channel without a meeting link can join the huddle.
• Offers a level of casualness that is often missing in the current remote work environments.
• Can’t be recorded and thus remains informal.

Why it might not click?

• Slack is synonymous with formal setup & thus creating an offline experience is challenging & demands a learning curve for users.
• It doesn’t solve the major user pain-point of video/audio call meetings.
• It’s audio-only & doesn’t give an option to convert audio calls to video calls.
• Can create confusion since Slack already has a call option that serves a purpose for both audio & video.
• Leaving a huddle is pretty confusing- you have to toggle off the headphone icon.

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