Product Release Notes Q1 2026
CultureBot Q1 2026 Release Notes
Q1 2026 brought some meaningful updates to CultureBot, and we wanted to walk you through what's new. This release focused on three main objectives: giving admins more centralized control, making sure team celebrations actually get seen, and improving the features you rely on day to day.
Here's what landed in Q1 2026:
🚀 New Features
Shoutout Feed updates
The Shoutout Feed, your central hub for browsing and filtering recognition across your org, got some meaningful improvements this quarter to make it easier for both admins and employees to access. You can view the feed instantly at getculturebot.com/app/shoutouts/feed, find it under the Home tab in Slack, or navigate to the Shoutouts tab in MS Teams.
Once you're in, you can filter by audience (your own shoutouts, company-wide, or direct reports), date range, and engagement level. A stats panel on the right updates in real time to show points, shoutout volume, top values being recognized, most active channels, and a leaderboard of top givers and recipients.
@Channel Mentions for Celebrations
Want to make sure birthdays and work anniversaries actually get noticed? You can now enable an @channel mention for Custom Celebrations, Birthdays, Anniversaries, and Experience Messages. It's a simple checkbox toggle in your Watercooler Settings and Celebration Configuration, and it works across Slack and the Web App. (MS Teams support is on its way!)
Admin Opt-Out Control
Admins can now manage the employee opt-out list directly from the web dashboard. Toggle individual employees on or off with a single click. This was one of our most-requested features, and we're glad it's finally here.
Workspace Profiles and Employee Directory
This quarter we're softly introducing Company Profiles to CultureBot. You can now save information about your company's culture in one place: your mission, core values, mantras or catchphrases, communities (including special interest channels and ERG channels), company branding, materials like PDFs and links, and social media profiles.
We've also refreshed the Employee Directory with a new profile view. Employees can now add bios, pronouns, fun Q&A responses, special interests, languages, and skills. This is the first of many updates coming to make CultureBot a more powerful tool for capturing insight across the full employee experience.
✨ Improvements
- HRIS syncing: Job title, department, and manager fields now sync from Merge HRIS providers, with tracking for any modified fields.
- Emoji support in Shoutouts: You can now add emojis directly to your shoutouts. We also added
/kudosbotas an alias for the shoutout command if your team prefers "kudos" instead of "shoutouts" - Smarter Experience Messages: Deactivated Slack users are now automatically skipped for Experience Messages.
- MS Teams navigation: Channel dropdowns now display as "Team Name > Channel Name" for easier navigation in larger orgs. Celebration banners have also been moved higher in the message so they don't get buried.
- Reporting upgrades: The report download button is more visible, and Peer Reward Point Redemption Reports now include email addresses for easier tracking.
🛠️ Behind the Scene Fixes
- Gift Card Auto-Approvals are now instant.
- We've introduced a new banner when redeeming Peer Rewards points for gift cards, and during the checkout process employees can clearly see which country they are redeeming in.
- Error messages when creating Custom Celebrations are now much more specific, so you'll know exactly what to fix.
Questions? Reach out to us at support@getculturebot.com. We're always happy to help.