April 2026, Product Release Notes

What's New in CultureBot: April 2026

This month's release includes smarter recognition features and one of our most requested feature updates to date. Check it out below!

Post CultureBot Messages as Any Team Member

Custom Celebrations, Birthdays, Anniversaries, Watercooler instances | Slack


Admins can now configure CultureBot to send messages as a specific team member rather than as the bot. Want birthday messages to come from your Chief People Officer? Water cooler prompts from a team lead? You can set a different posting identity for each feature, and the person you choose doesn't need admin access.


Where it's available: Birthdays, Work Anniversaries, Custom Celebrations, Water Cooler, Campaigns, and Experience steps.


How to set it up:

  • In any supported feature's settings, find the new Send As dropdown
  • Choose from three options: CultureBot (default), Main Admin, or a specific workspace member
  • Each feature can have its own selection; they don't all need to match

A few things to know:

  • Messages posted this way will show a small APP badge in Slack. This is a Slack platform constraint, not a CultureBot limitation. We're working on removing it in a future update coming this summer.
  • If the person you've selected is later deactivated, CultureBot will automatically fall back to posting as itself.

Note: Microsoft Teams support for ghost publishing is coming this summer. No configuration is needed now — when it becomes available, your settings will carry over.


Shoutout Badges on Employee Profiles

Recognition | Employee Profiles on the Web App


Employee profile pages now include a Recognition card showing every shoutout type available in your workspace. This gives employees a clear view of the recognition they've earned and what's still out there.


What you'll see on the Recognition card:

  • A badge grid displaying all shoutout types in your workspace in a 4-column layout. Each badge shows the shoutout type name, its icon or emoji, and a count of how many times that employee has received it.
  • Earned badges sort to the top, ordered by count (highest first). Unearned badge types are shown too, dimmed at 50% opacity, so employees can see what's available.
  • A stats row below the grid showing total shoutouts received, total points earned, and a link to the Team Shoutouts Feed.
  • The card header shows a running tally: X of Y collected (earned badge types out of total types available in the workspace).

If your workspace uses custom shoutout types with custom icons, background images, or brand colors, those all render on the badge. No setup needed — badges populate automatically on all employee profiles.


Birthday and Work Anniversary Countdowns on Profiles

Celebrations | Employee Profiles on Web App


Profile pages now display a visual countdown tag when an employee's birthday or work anniversary is coming up soon. The tag is color-coded by urgency and shows "Today!" on the actual day.


This is especially useful for managers who want a quick heads-up before a milestone, without needing to track dates separately.


Available Points Balance When Sending a Shoutout

Peer Rewards | Shoutouts | Slack & MS Teams


When sending a shoutout with reward points, the points field now shows a hint line directly below it:


"You have [X] points available to give this month."


This is a live remaining balance, calculated by taking the team's monthly allowance and subtracting points the user has already given out that month. Employees no longer have to guess or look it up before deciding how many points to attach to a shoutout.


This field only appears for workspaces that have peer reward points enabled. If your workspace doesn't use points, you won't see any change.


Deactivated Users Now Supported

Platform-Wide Improvement | Slack & MS Teams


This release allows you to send CultureBot support (support@getculturebot.com) a spreadsheet of users you'd like to deactivate from using CultureBot's features.


Deactivated users are now excluded from:

  • Employee Intros pairing cycles
  • Birthday and work anniversary celebration sends
  • Birthday and anniversary onboarding messages
  • Employee Lottery draws
  • Ghost posting / Send As dropdown
  • Being able to send shoutouts

Note for Employee Intros: If a user is deactivated mid-pairing cycle, their current pairing will complete as normal. The exclusion takes effect for all future cycles.


This fix also came with a meaningful performance improvement. Previously, many features were making live API calls to Slack or Microsoft Graph to retrieve user lists, which could take 3 to 5 seconds per call. Those calls now read from CultureBot's own database instead, bringing response times down to around 10 to 30 milliseconds. Large workspaces should notice faster load times across features.


Have questions about any of these updates? Reach out to us at support@getculturebot.com and we're happy to help.

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