I’m launching an experiment: a Slack group for /Filmcast listeners/fans to talk movies. That’s certainly one way to position another video chat app, which might make even the most office-averse worker yearn for the days of IRL huddles.I recently launched a Slack group for my podcast, the /Filmcast: “The new normal is embracing the flexibility that it turns out people always wanted, but never had access to before.” “Now that we’re 27 months in, we’re seeing that this new normal isn’t a snapback to the five-day work week,” Desai Weiss says. Slack is betting that the office of the future is hybrid, with some in-person days, some work-from-home days, and more teams scattered across time zones and space. And even if Huddles is the future of work chats, the future of actual, physical work spaces still hangs in the balance. Until people start using the new version of Huddles, the better-or-bloated debate won’t be settled.
When I asked Desai Weiss about this, he replied, “Honestly, until you asked that question, I had never even thought about that, and I can safely say we have no plans or intentions of doing anything in that vein.” Zoom has recently come under fire for a feature for sales teams that tries to infer a person’s engagement and patience during calls. And at least Slack will not attempt to detect its users’ fatigue from their facial expressions or voice tones in Huddles. Slack says Huddles will still support impromptu conversations, living one click away from any channel or DM starting in audio-only first. But they’ve also made us less mobile, and cognitively exhausted. If Huddles is one of the closest things we have to spontaneous, swing-by-your desk communication at work right now, why bog it down with videos and chat boxes and reaction emoji? Video apps like Zoom have become an actual lifesaver during a time when our real-life interactions were forced into virtual spaces. Still, there seems a real risk of bloating Huddles, which, as one WIRED editor put it, could be akin to attaching a Conestoga wagon to a race car. The company built the new Huddles, Desai Weiss insists, because users were “enthusiastically asking” for the original version to be extended with new features.
It's also possible that Slack may eventually charge big businesses more for certain Huddle features, though Desai Weiss says that the full experience is available on all three of Slack's paid plans and that it has no plans to change that. There is one obvious answer: because Zoom and Teams actually are competitors, and Slack wants to draw users back into Slack as much as possible. One of the more befuddling aspects of the new Huddles is why, if it was already such a success, Slack would want to mess with it. Most Huddles last only 10 minutes, which may not please the engagement gods but speaks to a certain efficiency-much like those IRL huddles.
Nearly 44 percent of Slack’s paying enterprise customers use Huddles on a weekly basis, which equates to a combined 243 million minutes per week.
It’s the fastest-adopted feature in Slack’s nine-year history. And it has been, according to Slack, a hit. It was an immediate hang space, launched easily from within a Slack channel or a direct message. Last June, the popular workplace chat app Slack introduced Huddles, an audio-only feature designed to replicate the real-life thing.
Then 2020 arrived and, well, we all know what happened next. We huddled by the water cooler, or in the kitchen. A huddle happened when a colleague strolled by your desk and asked for a quick sec that stretched to five minutes.
Free of the formalities of a meeting or the intellectual rigor of a brainstorm, a huddle was spontaneous, productive, and (mostly) good-sported, the workplace equivalent of a basketball team taking a time-out to strategize. In the Before Times, we used to huddle in real life.