Last week, a prominent New York Times columnist named Bari Weiss wrote a letter to the newspaper editor to tell her she was resigning.
He claimed that a “new McCarthyism” had taken root in the newsroom, and his “wrong” views on what were considered the “right causes” had spurred “constant harassment” of co-workers whose behavior had gone unpunished. Then he wrote a sentence that would not have made sense before 2014: “My work and my character are downgraded openly on Slack channels across the company.”
I mention 2014 because that was the official launch year for Slack, the increasingly inescapable office instant messaging system. If you have never used it, imagine an improved version of WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger that facilitates chatting with people from your company 24 hours a day.
By many measures, it is wonderful. By 2015, Slack was valued at nearly $ 3 billion. In its stock market debut last year, it hit $ 20 billion. More than 750,000 companies (including the FT) have signed up for it, and at least 12 million people actively use it every day. Use has increased during the pandemic as people working from home have struggled to stay in touch. Daily messages sent increased by an average of 20% per user worldwide between February 1 and March 25.
But here’s the thing about Slack and its growing number of rivals: Not everyone who owns it uses it.
I have no idea who wrote what happened to Mrs. Weiss in the New York Times, nor do I know if her bosses should have done anything about it.
But I’m willing to bet that not all senior managers were as glued to Slack as the ones who wrote.
To broadly generalize, workers who grew up texting or WhatsApp instead of calling or sending emails gravitate easily to a system like Slack, but their bosses often don’t.
Some analysts think this means that Slack and his peers are driving a “bottom-up revolution” in American media companies, where younger employees use the tools to organize and demand change. I suspect this would have happened anyway, and not just in American media groups.
But I do think Weiss’s letter highlights one of the most annoying problems with systems like Slack: They fragment communication, especially within large companies that need it more than ever now that so many staff are working from home.
A friend of mine at a large company often moaned before the pandemic about the need to constantly check important job news by email and Slack, along with Google chat, Facebook Workplace, and a host of other platforms that had been relentlessly slipped into his office. Now it’s gone into overdrive.
That points to one of the biggest flaws in the chat tools in the workplace. Inbox emails were supposed to be replaced or at least reduced. Instead, too many people must now spend time monitoring both.
Thats not all. Because Slack feels so similar to the ping messaging apps we use at home, it instills a sense of privacy at work that doesn’t necessarily exist.
There are times when its use makes sense. For a unique team assignment with a pressing deadline, it’s brilliant. It can also help keep remote team members in touch.
But the main reason it will always be difficult for me to love Slack is that it can be such a monumental distraction.
Last week I contacted a company called Time is Ltd that discusses the use of systems like Slack to help companies increase productivity.
He told me that Slack users are sending, and receiving, between 800 and 2,500 messages per month. Not only that, once they receive a message addressed to themselves, they tend to respond in an average of just 12 minutes.
That adds to many interruptions, which is a problem. The researchers say it can take around 23 minutes to return to the task at hand after being interrupted. Some jobs require relentless communication. But most do not, which means that much of this activity hurts productivity or creates extra stressful work to make up for lost time. Either way, relaxing from Slack makes perfect sense to me.
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Twitter: @pilitaclark
