Remote jobs boom real boon for Slack

Coronavirus has hastened the demise of work email, writes Supratim Adhikari.

The forced migration of workers from their cubicles to home offices, courtesy of the coronavirus outbreak, will fast-forward the demise of the corporate inbox, says Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield.

‘‘What’s happened here is that we have skipped a couple of years in what’s an inevitable transition away from inboxes and from an individual approach to a team approach,’’ the chief executive of the workplace messaging service said.

‘‘The email is not going to go away because it has its uses but, frankly, it’s a terrible choice in these sorts of dynamic situations.’’

Valued at more than US$15 billion (NZ$25b), Slack is the poster child of the office collaboration technology scene, and the recent surge in demand for remote working promises an unprecedented windfall for the company.

The number of people using Slack at the same time hit 12.5 million this week globally, average messages sent a day are up by 20 per cent, and average active usage has surged past a billion minutes each weekday.

Those numbers are likely to keep improving as the pandemic continues to spread.

Slack isn’t the only company benefiting from the craze. Microsoft’s collaboration platform, Teams, and remote video conferencing outfit, Zoom, are also going gangbusters.

According to Butterfield, the increased intensity of usage, while welcomed, also posed the toughest test yet for the remote working trend. ‘‘This is not just the regular work from home transition, this is working in a pandemic, and a big challenge for a lot of people who have never had a home office.

‘‘Kids are staying home from school, grandparents can’t help out, and you can’t really go out, so all of these conditions make this a very unique situation,’’ he said.

He was also circumspect about how long the remote working boom would last, especially as the spectre of a recession looms over the global economy.

‘‘There’s a huge opportunity as new people sign up, but I think that will pass because there has been a mad rush.

‘‘But we have to balance the short-term opportunity we have against the potential risks faced by our customers,’’ he said.

‘‘Many of our customers are small businesses and they could go out of business, we have large airlines, hotel chains as customers, and they are being hit very hard.’’

Slack started life as an internal tool for Butterfield’s video games development company but its subsequent pivot into a workplace productivity tool now puts it at the front line of an unprecedented shift in the way we work. It’s a challenge Butterfield said the company was taking very seriously.

‘‘In many ways we were built for this, not necessarily for working from home, but certainly for creating alignment inside an organisation that delivers transparency and allows organisations to be more capable of dealing with disruption.’’ – Sydney Morning Herald