Teleworking does not sit well with everyone. Slack's new profile features, which were published today, could make some everyday activities, particularly onboarding, a little easier for those who are.
Slack is a communication tool for businesses that links people with the information they need. Slack transforms the way organizations collaborate by bringing people together to work as a single team.
Slack enables you to operate in a more collaborative, flexible, and inclusive manner. It makes it simple to communicate with your coworkers - you can message anyone inside or outside your company and work together as if you were in person. People can work in specific places known as channels, which connect the right people with the correct information.
Slack supports asynchronous work. When your work is organized into channels, you can get the information you need whenever you choose, independent of your location, time zone, or function. Without planning schedules, you can ask questions, learn about new advancements, and share updates. It allows everyone in a company to have access to the same shared and searchable information. When teams interact through channels, information can be shared with everyone at once, allowing them to stay aligned and make decisions more quickly.
And now, Pronunciation guides for profiles are available in Slack, allowing users to contribute name pronunciations in the form of phonetic spellings or audio recordings. They're starting to surface in select Slack clients this week under the Display Name and Pronunciation sections, with a full deployment expected in the following weeks.
Slack's other inclusion efforts, such as a field for pronouns in profiles, are used to pronounce names.
In a related development, Slack has introduced Hover Cards, which are effectively pop-ups. When you hover your mouse over a person's name, a compressed Hover Card version of their profile appears, along with links to start a "huddle," a call, or an instant message.
Finally, three new fields have been added to Slack profiles: Contact Information, People, and About Me. People indicate the teams the individual works with and their position in the organization's structure, while Contact information shows email and phone information. About Me is more dynamic, however it might include information such as the user's birth date, languages spoken, pets, and birthdays, depending on what the user decides to reveal.
Atlas, Slack's premium addition to its Business + and Enterprise Grid services, is another improvement. Administrators can now define custom fields that are transformed into searchable, filterable tags like "expertise," "focus area," and "language" using a new data type called Smart Tags.
Another addition, Flexible Text, allows you to use up to 5,000 rich text characters in your profile sections, including bullet points, links, line breaks, code blocks, emoji, and more.
Maxwell Hayman, product director at Slack, said, "By helping people understand who their colleagues are as human beings, our redesigned profiles make it easier for teammates to collaborate, feel connected, and do their best work together."
