Your Slack status during meetings.

If you have ever finished a 60-minute video call and noticed Slack quietly flipped you to Away halfway through, you have run into one of the more inconvenient quirks of Slack presence: Slack does not know you are in a meeting. It only knows whether your keyboard or mouse has been touched. Here is exactly what happens during Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, and Slack's own huddles — and how to keep the dot green without nervously moving the cursor every few minutes.

What Slack measures, and what it doesn't

Slack's presence engine has exactly one input: OS-level keyboard and mouse events. If your operating system reports input — a click, a key press, a mouse twitch — Slack resets its 30-minute timer. If no input comes through for 30 minutes, you flip to Away.

That is the whole rule. Slack does not poll your webcam, your microphone, your calendar, your headphones, or any other application. It does not know whether you have a meeting open. It does not know whether you are talking. It only knows whether the OS has registered a key press or mouse move in the last 30 minutes.

Zoom meetings

Slack does not stay green during a Zoom meeting unless you keep moving the mouse or typing. A typical pattern: you join a Zoom at 9am, mute yourself, and listen to a colleague present for an hour. At 9:30am, with no input registered, Slack flips you to Away. Your camera is on, your face is visible, but as far as Slack is concerned, your machine has been idle for half an hour.

The two things that do keep Slack green during Zoom:

• Active typing — chat messages, notes in another app, anything keyboard-driven
• Active mouse movement — scrolling Zoom chat, fidgeting on the trackpad, mouse jiggler running

Listening, watching, talking, being on camera — none of these register as input.

Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex

Same story. None of these video tools talk to Slack. None of them tell Slack "this user is in a meeting." If you are not generating mouse or keyboard input, you go Away after 30 minutes regardless of which video platform you are on.

Google Meet has one small advantage: if you have it open in a Chrome tab and are scrolling in the side chat occasionally, the scroll counts as input. But that is incidental — not an integration.

Slack huddles — the only exception

If you are in a Slack huddle (Slack's built-in voice call), the Slack desktop app counts the huddle itself as active input. As long as the huddle is connected, the dot stays green. This is the only video- or voice-meeting type that Slack natively recognises, because it is built into the same client.

That is the workaround a small number of teams use deliberately: replace external video calls with huddles, and presence handles itself.

Screen sharing — does presenting count?

No. Screen sharing in Zoom, Meet, Teams, or any other tool does not generate input that Slack measures. Whether the dot stays green during a screen share depends entirely on what you are doing while you share.

If you are presenting a slide deck and advancing slides every minute or two — that counts (key press). If you are demoing a product and clicking around — that counts (mouse movement). If you are sharing a static page and talking over it for 30 minutes — you will go Away.

"In a meeting" custom status — separate thing

Slack has a custom status field separate from the presence dot. The Google Calendar integration can set your custom status to a meeting emoji (📅 "In a meeting until 10:00") when an event starts. This is helpful for colleagues who hover to check, but it does not affect the green dot at all.

You can be sitting in a meeting, with the custom status showing "In a meeting," and your presence dot flipped to Away. The two systems are independent. Custom status is metadata; presence is the underlying state.

Mobile changes the picture

If you are signed into Slack on both desktop and mobile, Slack uses an "OR" rule: you stay green as long as any session reports active. On mobile, "active" means "the Slack app is open and in the foreground."

This is why some people stay green during meetings even when desktop goes Away — their phone has Slack open in the foreground. The moment they background the app or the screen sleeps, that signal stops.

The cleanest fix

If you find yourself nudging the mouse during meetings, or losing track of when Slack flipped you to Away, the cleanest answer is to remove the question entirely. Cloud presence services hold the Slack connection independently of your machine — the dot stays green through every meeting, no input required. Read the full breakdown in our guide to keeping Slack active automatically.