5 collaboration tips to level up your workday with the new Zoom Workplace

One of the biggest challenges of collaborating in today’s multifaceted work environment is keeping track of all the information that gets passed around between different teams and projects. Multiple collaboration tools and siloed communication channels make it hard to keep everyone in the loop. 

The good news is that collaborating with your colleagues, partners, and customers just got a whole lot easier with Zoom Workplace! Now you can power your workday with a single app that includes Zoom AI Companion, our AI assistant, helping you reduce context switching, time spent digging for information, and miscommunication. 

AI Companion is infused throughout Zoom Workplace, helping you compose messages in chat or email; organize your ideas on a whiteboard; and summarize meetings, phone calls, and chat messages. Not only can it help you save time with capabilities like voicemail prioritization on Zoom Phone, but it can also help you get everyone aligned by identifying next steps in a meeting, allowing you to streamline the way you work and maximize your productivity across the platform.

The real power of Zoom Workplace lies in how it helps you organize your workday around effective collaboration, letting you connect more efficiently with the people and projects you work with closely. Here are five things you can do to get the most out of the new experience.

Meetings are often a central point of collaboration for a group or project. You might have a recurring meeting with the same people every week to discuss the progress of a particular project and need to keep tabs on what’s going on in between those meetings, too. 

Next time you’re creating a new meeting (or series of recurring meetings), make sure the option to enable continuous meeting chat is toggled on. This creates a persistent chat channel attached to that meeting ID.

You can chat with the group beforehand, continue the conversation when you hop on the meeting together, and keep the discussion going in between calls. All the documents, images, and files shared during the meeting can be added to the Resources tab of your continuous meeting chat, organized by asset type so everyone can easily find what they need.

In the new, streamlined calendar and meetings tabs in Zoom Workplace, you can click on each meeting card to open the full details of that meeting. Here, you can upload supplemental items for the meeting, including agendas and whiteboards, so other attendees know where to find them. You can access the continuous meeting chat here, as well as start a chat or email invitees from the meeting card.

To try out this new view, click Settings in your online account portal. Toggle on the setting to enable the new Meetings tab experience (make sure your Google or Microsoft 365 calendar is connected or get started with Zoom Mail and Calendar). Then, click the Calendar tab in Zoom Workplace to view your schedule and add or access assets for your upcoming meetings.

If you manage a team, you can make it easy for your colleagues to be looped into all the right conversations. Create a shared space in Team Chat and add all the members of your team, then add all the chat channels they might need to know about, from department-wide channels to project-based conversations — everyone in the space will automatically get added to the channels they’re not already a part of. As your team grows, you can easily add new members to the shared space, saving time in the onboarding process by giving them access to all the channels they need, rather than manually adding them to each channel individually.

To get started, go to your Team Chat tab and click the + icon, then select Shared Space. You can name your space, add members (you can even add an existing channel), and customize your preferences. Once your space is created, continue adding members and channels based on the needs of your team.

Video meetings are core to how teams communicate and collaborate, especially when employees, clients, partners, and vendors might be spread across different locations. But the same old meeting experience can get a little stale, resulting in disengagement from attendees.

With our new Zoom Meetings experience, collaboration is easier and more readily available at your fingertips. You can now share and co-edit whiteboards and notes, as well as collaborate on documents from Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, and Microsoft Sharepoint, directly in meetings — no more toggling between your meeting window and your open document. Try this by clicking Share and selecting the Documents tab. 

In addition to these helpful collaboration capabilities, the new meeting experience includes:

• A simplified toolbar so you can easily turn on AI Companion, share your screen, and find host tools.
• A new multi-speaker view, which gives you a more dynamic look at people who are actively speaking.
• Options to add a fresh look with new custom theme colors and portrait lighting, which dims your background while highlighting you to help you stand out. Hosts can also add wallpapers to the meeting.
• Better sound quality in open environments due to personalized audio isolation, which helps your voice sound clearer during meetings and helps to suppress background noise. 

For hybrid or in-office employees, booking a desk is becoming a common part of the workplace experience. If you’ve been using Workspace Reservation on your phone or in your online Zoom account portal to book your desk, you can now do that directly from the Zoom Workplace app using our new Workspaces tab. 

You can even get an extra assist with choosing your workspace with our smart recommendations. Under the Workspaces tab, click the robot icon on the left to get an AI-powered recommendation of the best days to come in (depending on when the people you collaborate with most have reserved a desk) and the best place to sit (depending on your preferences and proximity to your most frequent collaborators).

Excited to get started with Zoom Workplace? Update your Zoom desktop app to 6.0 or higher to start using the new capabilities and experiences mentioned above. 

Stay tuned for upcoming features we’ll be rolling out in the next few months, including Ask AI Companion, which will bring together even more of the platform at your fingertips.

Editor's note: This blog was originally published in July 2016 and was updated in April 2024 with the latest Zoom collaboration features and products.