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The way Slack's early adopters talked about workplace messaging in the 2010s sounds unhinged today. It’s the “friend” in the office, the “glue” that keeps the team together, and what makes work fun. Of course, we now know that non-stop messaging can make logging off that much harder. But at least we can send emojis to our boss.
As compensation for tying us to our jobs, workplace messaging has helped upend office norms. The idea that work requires a separate, more rigid identity is falling out of favor.
A new generation of the workforce coupled with the rise of remote work due to the pandemic has led to a more casual tone. Suits, ties, and other formal trappings are less popular. The email signature of “Best regards” is being replaced by a simple “Thank you.” Internal chat rarely has a sign-off ritual—other than a thumbs-up. Slack and Microsoft Teams even allow employees to play video games.
California got there first. When I got here in 2018, I had a wardrobe of uncomfortable work clothes and thought email and phone calls were the way to reach coworkers. On my first day, I was exposed to a quick Slack conversation in the Financial Times’ San Francisco bureau. Within the first week, I realized that every meeting I attended was a sweater and sneaker party, so I changed my wardrobe accordingly.
The tech industry has proven that being casual doesn’t mean being unprofessional or inefficient. But this thinking still permeates some of the more conservative groups in society. Exactly what kind of work should be done through chat is also a question.
I thought about this late last year while sitting in court at the trial between Epic Games and Google. While the focus of the lawsuit is Google's App Store, the judge seemed surprised that much of Google's work is on Chat.
He criticized the company for allowing such communications to be treated differently from emails. The message's auto-delete setting contributes to its short-lived conversational tone. However, the judge described this as suppressing evidence.
I've been using chat and email interchangeably but didn't take this into account. Its similarity to text messaging means it's also easy to blend personal and professional conversations. The number of different group chats and personal messages creates a constant background noise that people can dip in and out of in an addictive, if not always productive, way.
To understand how this happened, you have to go back more than a decade to 2013 San Francisco. Messaging tools for organizations or enterprise platforms are not new. Google has been trying to promote such services almost as long as email has existed, launching Google Talk in 2005, a year after Gmail. There are also start-ups. But Slack is the hottest one.
Slack has video game-like overtones because it was born out of a startup developing multiplayer online games. When that plan didn't pan out, founder Stewart Butterfield turned to developing the team's internal chat platform. It's proven popular with other startups, who appreciate the design. By 2015, tech publication Wired wrote an article titled “Shut down your offices. You all work at Slack now.”
Workplace messaging companies like Slack say this method of communication reduces the need for meetings. Emojis provide shorthand reactions, reducing the number of messages. Such instant messaging is even thought to reduce the noise in open-plan offices by moving casual chats online.
The flip side is that this happens when employees let their guard down too much and forget that the work tools they use aren't always private. Bari Weiss brought up Slack when she resigned from The New York Times, saying colleagues criticized her on the platform and posted an ax emoji next to her name in company-wide channels.
Slack has lost some of its luster over the past year or so. This is partly a consequence of Salesforce's $28 billion acquisition in 2021. No longer a rogue upstart, it is now part of software giant Salesforce. Sales growth declined. The proportion was 16% last quarter, down from 33% the previous year. The co-founder has left. Like every other tech company, it is pinning its hopes on generating artificial intelligence.
But Slack's decline in popularity doesn't reflect a distaste for workplace messaging. This is the result of competitors like Google using their resources to grab share. The culture of nonstop, informal workplace chatter it helped create will go nowhere.
elaine.moore@ft.com
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