Give us some Slack
We use Slack around our shop. It’s not something I think about a lot. Then, recently I read a clever, funny novel called “Several People Are Typing,” by Calvin Kasulke, written entirely in the form of Slack conversations. It’s about a guy who gets literally sucked into the app, while Slackbot takes over his body.
No doubt it’s an allegory for our times.
If you’re uninitiated and innocent, Slack is workplace instant message software that’s supposed to make it easier to collaborate and communicate in our increasingly digital world. (Its acquisition and retention is also the main goal of members of the Church of the Subgenius, which has nothing to do with workplace productivity, so we’ll let that go for now. It’s just an interesting coincidence.)
Slack has been around since 2013, but we only began to rely on it shortly after the pandemic led us to send everyone home from the newsroom in March 2020. We all downloaded it to our laptops and digital devices, and for most of us, it’s replaced email as our primary mode of intra-office communication since our physical office has been atomized.
It works like a group texting app: You can send and receive messages and digital photos, PDFs, etc., instantaneously. You can share them with a select group of co-workers or with individuals. You can set up company or department-wide channels. You can create a private group to work on a specific project or plan a retirement party. We have a channel for story ideas. We have a “random” channel for whatever anyone wants to post, another for photos and videos of our pets.
Slack isn’t the only such program; Microsoft offers something called Teams that’s part of its Office suite of apps. Google has Hangouts, and Facebook—I mean Meta—has Workplace. I don’t know anything about these programs because I’ve never used them.
I don’t use Slack much either, which is probably something I should work on.
In theory, and probably in practice for a lot of people, Slack is supposed to make our working lives easier. Ten years ago in a white paper titled “The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies,” the consulting firm McKinsey & Company found the “average interaction worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the work week managing email and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks.”
An interaction worker, Google tells me, is someone whose job requires them to spend time interacting with other people. Managers, salespeople, teachers, police officers and customer service reps would be interaction workers.
I would be an interaction reporter when I’m working as an editor or reporter, when I’m dealing with email, or when trying to convince another editor of the importance of a particular story. I would be the opposite of an interaction worker when I’m writing.
One curious thing I noticed when we began working from home was that, from a production side—the actual assembling of the newspaper— we seem to work better remotely than when we are all under one roof. A little of that is simply that we are working with digital materials rather than printed pages; we don’t have to wait for pages to be printed and passed
around. Everyone who needs to see a page before it goes to print can get it.
But that was really just a matter of shaving seconds off the process.
A lot of studies support my observation that we seem to be more productive working from our homes, and one of the main reasons may seem counterintuitive. While it’s something of a badge of honor to appear to be immediately available, the reasons we seem to perform better outside an office environment have a lot to do with our being able to turn off the dinging distractions of email and collegial demands.
Slack and similar apps are designed to facilitate “in real time”— to provide us with the opportunity to quickly respond to colleagues— but studies show that remote workers thrive on asynchronous communication. While real-time exchanges encourage us to throw out ideas on instinct, to banter and be snappy, we’re usually better when we respond in our own time.
Most people probably understand this intuitively. So our Slack channels have evolved into a couple of major forms. We have the conversational ones where work is surely discussed, but in a low-key water-cooler sort of way, and more professional ones, where questions are asked and answered.
The latter tend to be more asynchronous. We’ve adapted the technology to our needs and use it in different ways. Some of my colleagues seem to keep the Slack window open all the time, often commenting. Others would rather make an appearance. I tend to keep it open, but on an iPad that’s muted and a few feet from my desk. When I’m in non-interaction worker mode, I don’t look at it at all.
Writing is, by necessity, lonely work. Almost everybody who has ever tried to communicate with me knows I favor asynchronous communication. I will get around to returning email (usually) but need to do it on my own schedule. This is why I might appear to be bad at Slack.
I’m not against technology; I rather like it. I had a “portable” computer in 1987. (It weighed 41 pounds.) I was the first person at this newspaper to put my email address at the end of my column (my personal email address, before we even had a company email server). I think social media is a good thing for society and that Facebook, Twitter and other apps can be used intelligently by individuals who understand the transactions they are making.
You’re not getting something for nothing; in exchange for the platform that Big Tech is providing, you’re giving up useful information about yourself and your habits. If that bothers you, you probably shouldn’t use their services.
You’ll be fine if you just think of social media as a public space where you have no expectation of privacy. It’s when people start forgetting about their digital surroundings that they get into trouble; Facebook is more public than the public square, because you might get away with pulling your pants down in a public square. On Facebook, there’s always going to be someone to screenshot your indiscretion.
And Slack, well, no doubt there’s someone who can read all your messages.