Do we want Slack to replace email?
Slack is coming for your job. The workplace chat company, valued at more than $7 billion at the time of its last funding round, went public this month. It claims to already have more than 10 million daily users and bills itself as the answer to bloated inboxes everywhere.
This is all very exciting, if you’re Slack. But most of us aren’t quite there yet. The company says it has 88,000 paying customers — a sliver of a sliver of the world’s desk-and-phone-bound office workers, and fewer than work full time at, for example, Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
Speaking of Google, the company has a Slack alternative of its own, called Hangouts Chat, as does Facebook, in Workplace. Microsoft has Teams, which is bundled with its Office software and which the company says is being used by more than 500,000 organizations.
This multifront attack on email is just beginning, but a wartime narrative already dominates: The universally despised office culture of replies and forwards and mass CCs and “looping in” and “circling back” is on its way out, and it’s going to be replaced by chat apps. So what happens if they actually win?
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT CHAT
A workplace does not simply start using Slack. It is not “adopted” in the manner of a new system for expenses or a new video meeting app. Slack arrives like word of a new office space or a coming restructuring. Slack is where and how work gets done.
I put out a call for stories from post-chat workplaces, and some replies were indistinguishable from the company’s own case studies. For the right office, it’s a huge relief to chat.
“I know for the engineering team it’s a game-changer,” said Shannon Todesca, an employee at CarGurus, an automotive shopping site. “It’s used to keep track of code pushes,” she said, as well as system errors. Workers also report dentist appointments and sick days to the #ooo (out of office) channel, preventing inboxes from getting clogged.
At Automattic, which runs Wordpress.com and a handful of smaller internet services, Slack is the glue that binds a fully remote “virtual office” of nearly 1,000 employees living in dozens of countries and working on vastly different products.
Scaleworks, a Texas-based tech fund, uses Slack to manage its portfolio of companies, but also to let them share with one another.
“The CEOs work collaboratively on hard problems,” said Drew Olanoff, a company spokesman. “Slack plays a big part there.”
Searchable, real-time chat has been a boon to smaller, nontech companies, too. Matt Lien, a producer at Flag Family Media, which operates a pair of AM radio stations in North Dakota, said Slack has improved his daily work experience.
“Having a place to put audio files, random phone numbers, breaking news or even memes from our listeners has made all of our jobs easier,” he said. “Not to mention being able to search for a guest phone number if we lose it.”
Many of the purely happy Slackers who I spoke to, however, did tend to share a few traits. The tech industry was overrepresented, of course, and so, too, were young workers who came of age while chatting online. Also overrepresented were bosses: managers enjoying new “transparency” and “efficiencies,” suddenly given a panoptic view of a freshly renovated virtual office. The sorts of people who might read this pitch from Slack …
“As a result of the alignment teams and organizations are able to maintain while continuously adapting to respond in increasingly dynamic environments, less effort and energy is wasted and the human beings on those teams are able to fully utilize their intelligence and creativity in pursuit of the organization’s shared objectives.”
… and think, “sounds great,” instead of, maybe, “uh-oh.”
Rank-and-file employees were more likely to share concerns about the new era of office chat. There was the woman who cited a “truly unhinged Slack situation” — dozens of new rooms serving a workflow that seemed only to make sense to the new boss — as one reason she ultimately left her job at a major media company.
There was the guy who told of an ambitious new employee at his firm who spent his first weeks scouring thousands of Slack logs dating back years before his arrival. “He has an encyclopedic knowledge of why certain decisions were made and every personnel thing that ever happened,” the employee said. “Every little interpersonal tiff. Every interview we ever conducted!”
There were the new employees themselves, who made the mistake of searching for their own names on their first days. (Venture capitalist Hunter Walk coined a term: “Slackenfreude,” which he defined as “the joy in knowing that as a Slack group grows, the likelihood of a new member searching their name and finding they’ve been slagged on in earlier conversations reaches 99.9 percent.”)
Most common were mixed feelings, often related to privacy and productivity. “We’ve had to consciously discuss using Slack less often,” said Lacey Berrien, who works at marketing startup Drift. “I had our IT team check a few weeks ago, and we were up to over 950 Slack channels,” she said, “and that doesn’t count the private ones.” (The company CEO recently told employees, via email, “Instead of an endless back and forth in Slack trying to get my point across I am just having a real conversation when convenient.”)
IS FASTER REALLY BETTER?
Slack reduces email, and email is bad, and so therefore it must follow that Slack is good. Furnishing a considerable tailwind to this marketing pitch is that people really do resent their email. Don’t you?
In a 2011 study published in the journal Organization Science, researchers noted that while email was widely regarded as a “growing source of stress in people’s lives,” research also suggests that it affords people “flexibility and control by enabling them to communicate from anywhere at any time.”
To attempt to address this contradiction, the researchers drew on interviews from nearly a decade earlier, conducted when email itself was still ripping through American offices, producing its own stories of relief, ambivalence and horror. Employees’ worries will sound familiar, and in hindsight maybe not unwarranted.
“Although, in theory, email’s asynchrony should have granted recipients the leeway to respond at a time that was convenient for them,” the study said, “our informants described strong cultural expectations about not keeping senders waiting.”
Email, the paper suggested, had actually become an “interpretive scapegoat for the workers’ perceptions that they were expected to do more than they could reasonably accomplish in a day.” Email itself was new and required ad
It also provided a “culturally sanctioned rhetoric of complaint about overload as well as a tangible ritual for regaining control: to cope with overload, trim your inbox.” Complaining about work might be risky. But email? Even your manager complains about that.
Stephen R. Barley, a professor of technology management at the University of California Santa Barbara and a co-author of the paper, remembers subjects lamenting, nearly 20 years ago, the erosion of work boundaries as symbolized and enacted by email. “I think what they’re really expressing, and most white-collar workers would never say this, is that these technologies are appropriating time at the beginning and end of days, without any kind of payment,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s an encroachment of work into other spaces in your life.”
For employees raised online, Slack looks and feels like a place to socialize. I grew up chatting with friends online and still do, sometimes in scattered Slack rooms. I have also spent the last 10 years at companies where work chat was the norm and observed the arrival of Slack with both relief and suspicion. Finally, a better work chat app. Then: Oh, god, this is really how people are going to work now?
Despite its emphasis to clients on increasing productivity and reducing waste, Slack doesn’t just blur the boundary between work and play. In some cases, it has also helped foster workplace collaboration of a particular and powerful sort.
At the online publication Slate, two decades of email culture quickly gave way to a companywide Slack in 2014, which splintered into channels for discussing everything from day-to-day business concerns to embryonic ideas.
“There’s a higher bar for sending an email than there is for sending a message on Slack,” L.V. Anderson, an employee at the time of the software’s introduction, wrote in an email. Senior staffers were more comfortable starting officewide discussions over email. “Slack felt more democratic and more welcoming,” she said.
There were dozens of rooms. Among them was #slatemillennial: a self-aware half-joke but also, in time, a space to talk openly about the concerns of younger staffers.
“From the beginning, I think the channel felt like a safe space for mild grousing about management, power dynamics and subtle inequities in the workplace,” Anjustment. derson said. A Slack discussion about sharing salaries led to the creation of a shared document, which led to further conversations about inequity.
Talk of unionizing, beginning in 2016 and spurred by a new hire, Tommy Craggs, started offline. Early recruitment leaned on Google Talk. When the effort started gaining steam and fostering major internal debate, it was back to Slack.
“It was the only platform that was easily accessible to everyone in the potential bargaining unit,” Anderson said. This room would be called #comrades, and it would be private. There was a round of layoffs in 2017; remaining prounion staffers opened a new Slack, fully separate from Slate’s. The staff — by now minus Craggs and Anderson — voted to unionize in early 2018 and spent the next year fighting for a contract.
As negotiations became tense, in late 2018, the union members voted to authorize a strike — by not working on Slack. “Today, Slate’s union is conducting an hourlong Slack strike to express our unity and commitment to what we’re asking for at the table,” the union tweeted in November. The move was met with teasing coverage. It was also followed by a vote to authorize a full strike. By January, they had a contract.