Vela Update 2: Voice
Bringing back natural conversation to the workplace in a remote-first world.
Vela is a new kind of workplace messaging platform I’m building to foster more human connection in a remote-first world. You can check out the original announcement here.
Hello again! This week, I'm excited to give you a glimpse into how Vela delivers on its core focus: reintroducing voice to our daily communication as remote workers. Vela takes a unique approach to team collaboration and embraces the productive inefficiency of more natural conversation. But before diving in, I’d like to provide a brief overview of why voice communication is much more important than many may believe.
The importance of the human voice
Over the past decade or so, it seems that we’ve collectively and progressively chosen “productivity” over connection, and more so year after year. De-facto standard platforms like Slack and Teams have made this far easier to achieve. As a result, we no longer talk to our team members outside of scheduled meetings which are often constrained to a particular topic. Our work communication for 8 hours a day has transformed into a near-constant stream of text, absent of character.
During this stretch of time, we’ve also lost what it truly means to communicate. This unnatural method of collaboration combined with the shear overwhelming volume of artificial messages results in more anxiety, work-life balance issues, and, ironically, loneliness.
You see, it doesn’t matter how fast or asynchronous we communicate when that communication is borked in and of itself.
“a huge part of remote and hybrid work is that we’ve killed the vibes, and so our perceptions of each other“
- Priya Parker, author of “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters”1
This loss of human connection in our daily work interactions has far-reaching consequences. It affects not only our professional relationships but also our overall well-being and job satisfaction. The absence of spontaneous, casual conversations that once occurred naturally in physical office spaces has created a void in remote work environments. This void is precisely what Vela aims to address, by reintroducing the human element back into our digital workspaces.
As Jessica Methot, an associate professor at Rutgers University, notes2:
“it’s these day-to-day weak ties and frequency of [interactions] with people that matters.”
Vela’s approach
Every member of your space has a virtual “door”. This door can either be open or closed, either by clicking the icon in the top right or via a customizable keyboard shortcut. When open, you’ll be entered into the room’s open voice comms, available only through push-to-talk. This enables you and your team to collaborate more candidly while providing opportunities throughout the work day for “watercooler“ chat. Quick, impromptu questions are a perfect use case for this.
You can think of a room in Vela as a channel in most other chat apps.
When your door is closed, on the other hand, you won’t hear anything. You also won’t receive push notifications by default, though this can be changed in your settings. The hope here is to reduce cognitive strain and information overload, resulting in less stress, more productivity, and higher work satisfaction for everyone.
And if you read my original announcement post for Vela, you may remember that the app is a “floating panel” design by default, staying out of your way and accessible through a customizable keyboard shortcut, very similar to how macOS Spotlight works. This combined with the open line of voice communication with your team provides a seamless and connective work environment for remote workers like yours truly.
What’s next
As I close in on a beta release window, I’ll be providing more insights into the onboarding process and what pricing will look like at launch. And as always, please feel free to comment any feedback or suggestions, or email me at josh@tryvela.com.
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/hybrid-work-jobs-company-culture-6b1cb6e7?st=1qti3o5ozovcx3r&reflink=article_copyURL_share
https://www.wsj.com/articles/so-many-ways-to-communicate-at-work-so-many-ways-to-misfire-ec7d9f07?st=7xtfhkprc3sc5mn&reflink=article_copyURL_share