Imagine Jenny — it’s her first day on the job — we all know the familiar drill — she sits down at her new desk, look at her shiny new pad and her virgin laptop. The office around her is quiet — a hive of activity and she browses her welcome notes — waiting for her first meetings and her exciting new life to begin. Fast forward a week, and Jenny is back at her desk, the office around her is still as quiet as ever except she has now noticed the periods of furious typing followed by perhaps a hastily muted giggle from across the way. She realises there are whole conversations going on around the office but she has no idea what is being said or how to become part of them. She feels like an outsider in her new company.
Welcome to the world of an office powered by Slack. For those of you who have not yet watched their office be devoured by the “team communication tool for the 21st Century”, Slack is no more than that. It is a software tool meant to provide staff with a handy way to speak to each other, send files, and save and search conversations. And boy has it been successful. It launched in 2013 and by last count in 2017 it had approximately 5 million active users with the average person spending a whopping 10 hours a day plugged into Slack. It is particularly popular with start-ups that integrate it with lots of other tools like Github and Sketch. But with around $100 million in revenues last year, it also has a decent percentage of its user base on its Enterprise version.
It sounds like a pretty simple and successful messaging software right? So what’s the issue? For those who have seen Slack added merrily to their suite of office tools, they will have watched as their bubbly, chatty work colleagues become, what appears to the outsider, catatonic robots. This is of course not the case, the conversations are still well and truly happening but now behind closed screens. In the most extreme cases, colleagues who sit opposite each other would rather speak on Slack than say anything out loud. And the problem just perpetuates itself — the quieter the office gets, the less willing anyone is to speak out. It becomes so silent you can hear a pin drop.
I know, I know — I can hear those already saying that this is the future. That anyone who doesn’t worship at the temple of Slack is just a Luddite who harks back to a past that no longer exists. And it’s true — Slack is remarkable. It streamlines conversations, makes catching people on the go much easier (of course there is a Slack app for your phone!) and reduces the distractions on the open plan office floor. There is a reason why they have a $3.8 billion valuation (yes — you read that right!) and have raised around $540 million in funding (as of April 16).
But let’s jump back to Jenny for a moment. She is now in her third week; she hasn’t spoken to anyone really outside of her immediate role. She doesn’t have a feeling for how people speak to each other here, she doesn’t know what others outside her little team do, she has no idea who she might be friends with and she has no way to get in. She starts to feel a bit lost and miserable. And it’s not just a problem for Jenny. Actually Jamie in Operations is feeling the same. He has been here a few years, but since he started to specialise in the sourcing department he has started to feel like he has lost touch with the priorities for the company as a whole. He doesn’t hear anything about what the wider team is working on and it’s making his job harder and more isolated. He is also sick of the constant in-fighting in his team as people constantly misunderstand each other’s tone on the channels he is involved with. And then there is Gillian the accountant, a good few years older than the rest she will never be invited into all the gossip channels. But she used to enjoy hearing what the younger ones had got up to at the weekend — it made her feel like part of the community, that she understood the spirit of the company, that she was part of something bigger then book-keeping.
In essence, the culture of the company is slowly being eroded by the advent of this seemingly innocuous tool. If nothing is done, the company will lose its soul, its identity and ultimately its bottom line — because as anyone who has enjoyed a business book or two will know, company culture is why any of us get out of bed on Monday morning. That belief you are part of a company that reflects who you are in some way and shares the values that you hold dear (at least if you are lucky enough to be doing a job you love — and if not then leave — but that’s for another day!).
So what can we do? Throwing away Slack isn’t the answer — that is like trying to go back to an ex — it never works. But there are some practical things you can do to mitigate the issues that the Slack behemoth throws up:
1Well Hello There! — Culture is renewed and reinforced with every new starter in the company. It is they who will be the guardians of the culture for the future. As we have seen with Jenny, Slack makes it harder for new people to quickly grasp a company’s culture. The increased time it takes to get them into the company can harm both their confidence and also their long term prospects in the company as a result.
The most important thing a company can do to combat this is to have a Welcome Strategy that goes beyond an organisational chart and directions on how to call in sick. First impressions count. How you choose to set up your welcome strategy will depend on your office culture and, most importantly, should reflect it. If you have just started working in a Wall Street hedge fund you may find yourself in a dwarf strip club on your first afternoon (true story!). For others, it’s a comprehensive welcome plan, perhaps a welcome box with notes from the top team and anything else that reinforces what you are as a company (For inspiration on the ultimate example of this see the famous Apple letter — just search “Apple Welcome Note”). Making sure every new starter meets the founders can also be beneficial (if it’s still do-able) as it’s a chance for new starters to hear directly from the people who created the culture. This can also be done through running sessions for new starters on the history of the brand and the values that the company lives by, irrespective of their role.
Implementing a buddy system so that new starters have a physical person who can help the newbie ease into their company life can also make a real difference.
Make sure as part of your induction planning you ensure the new starter is already set up with all the core and “fun” Slack channels so they can jump into conversations straight away without having to guess whether it’s appropriate for them to join a particular channel. Finally — don’t rest on your laurels. Continually update your on-boarding process based on feedback from new employees to make sure you doing the best you can — hey you could even set up a Slack channel to gather feedback and ideas!
2Sharing is caring — As Slack starts to infiltrate a company, information that was once picked up on the fly by other teams is now lost. You can’t just overhear Debbie talking about the marketing strategy or the content team arguing about a new social post. People become absolutely focused on their tasks at hand but at the expense of the bigger picture. Staff start to talk about feeling left out, unable to understand the company goals or vision. Departments don’t share information anymore without being explicitly asked to and this leads to isolation and an even greater “silo” mentality. It’s this that was making Jamie, at the start, so frustrated.
The easiest way to combat this it to institutionalise time where teams meet together face to face. At a senior level, this could be a 10-minute meeting every morning to share goals for the day. For larger teams or indeed whole companies, implementing weekly or monthly all hand meetings gives teams the opportunity to hear directly from the leadership about what is going on in the company. The goal should be to lead from the top to reinforce a culture where we still speak to each other.
As part of weekly all hands meetings, you could also implement job sharing presentations where smaller teams could present to the rest of the company what they do, their current goals and challenges. This gives staff more insight into the company as a whole and also offers opportunities to ask questions either directly in the meeting or in the weeks following the presentations.
Finally, maybe think about having a no Slack day once a month where staff are forced at least occasionally to actually speak to each other. It is from these interactions that some of your best ideas might come.
As an aside — it makes sense to practice Safe Slack by clearly establishing rules of engagement from the moment you decide to introduce it. How many channels are you going to have? Who can add new channels? And what conversations should be had on Slack? Without some basic ground-rules the tool can quickly get out of hand — should your conversation be posted in brand management or the content brand planning channel? Who knows anymore — put it in all of them and hope for the best!
3The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said — As staff start to rely on Slack as their main communication tool, there is a risk of more misunderstandings, cultural clashes and general unhappiness. A quick message - dashed off on the way to a meeting -suddenly starts World War III. Messaging is efficient and enables the writer to communicate without the expectation of any real-time emotional feedback. Unfortunately, this type of communication eliminates the most important part, the things that aren’t said, that add context, meaning and emotion to a conversation — facial reactions, hand gestures, body posture and so on. People are left to interpret these elements from messages and humans almost always interpret things negatively.
Lead from the top — important conversations should be had face to face. You don’t dump your boyfriend by text and neither should Slack be used for any conversation that is serious, detailed, or personal. If someone tries to initiate that type of conversation on Slack it should always be shut down and taken face-to-face instead. This is something that founders and senior management need to model and ensure happens at every level of the business. And this isn’t just about bad news, topics that are complicated and involve more than two people or require creative thinking are almost always better had with everyone face-to-face, ideally in the same room.
4Go where the people dance! Now that Slack is well and truly entrenched, unless you are still one of the heathens who still smokes you probably don’t get to hear all the gossip anymore. Of course on the face of it this doesn’t seem important for the culture of a company. Who is sleeping with whom doesn’t really add to the bottom line. But in fact down-time at companies often provides some of the most important cultural moments. It’s where staff get to really know each other from across teams, celebrate successes and generally just enjoy time together in an office setting. As things become more and more online-focused (yes — that gif of Ryan Gosling was funny but…) it’s important that companies work hard to still build in time for staff to meet in the real world too. Regular team events reinforce your culture as a company — and again, ideally, these represent what you as a company stand for.
Take this one step further by developing a team of Cultural Ambassadors. This could be made up of people from across the organisation who develop and manage the events programme for the company so that everyone has a voice. And of course, as ever, when it comes to culture it’s important that the founders or bosses are part of these events — it’s your company after all.
Oh, one last thought on Slack while we are on the topic of gossip — a small caveat for the Millennials amongst you. There is a reason why your older colleagues in the team prefer to have those conversations over a coffee — there are some conversations that shouldn’t be recorded. Just because you are on a “private channel” doth not it private make. You are on company software and you should (rightly) assume that your conversations can be read by anyone with admin rights — for all posterity. Just be careful when you are slagging off your boss — you never know when it might come back to bite you.
In the end the most important thing you can do is acknowledge the issue. Cultures take time, love and nurturing to develop and can be destroyed in half the time they took to build. Managing a culture has always been a tricky balancing act — especially in start-ups where things change quickly. Don’t let a messaging technology destroy all your hard work under the guise of modern time saving.
Slack was originally built by developers for developers — the name is actually an acronym for a “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge” — does it get anymore geeky than that? It was not intended to replace all company communication and nor should it. Slack may use its uplifting little quotes every morning to make us think everything is sweetness and light. But beneath that cheery exterior is a dark heart that will rip to the core of your culture if you don’t do something about it. Don’t let it happen.