‘No video calls during office hours’; Slack CEO isn’t big on meetings

The chief executive officer of messaging service Slack thinks employers should reevaluate how workers spend their time at work. Due to the growing acceptance of hybrid working, many people increasingly divide their workweek between doing their jobs at home and in an office.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield believes that jobs that are hard to finish at home should be completed at work. He asserts that none of them are using headphones and working at a desk. Naturally, the CEO of an online messaging service won’t tell employees to leave their computers at home, but he does observe that doing so would ‘draw a sharp line in the sand about what the purpose of being together is’.

Slack’s corporate offices are spread throughout the US, Canada, Japan, Australia, and India, according to the BBC. ‘ The 80% of the floor area that we allocated to sort of factory-farm, battery-chicken housing for employees to use their computers all by themselves and listen to their headphones, and not talk to anyone else,’ says Butterfield of the company’s premises prior to the epidemic, was a bit of a waste’.

He asserts that continuing modifications are turning the Slack workplace into more of a social club since he wants his staff to come to work to communicate and make in-person contacts. The greatest thing we can do, he argues, is to foster a welcoming atmosphere where individuals can interact and genuinely have fun.

He also thinks that young people just starting their careers frequently prefer to work in an office setting among their peers and acknowledges that some people would opt to work full-time in an office setting because they are unable to or do not want to work from home. Butterfield doesn’t really like meetings all that much.

He agrees with Jeff Bezos’ suggestion from Amazon, where participants read a six-page paper as a briefing note before a meeting rather than paying attention to PowerPoint presentations. In a reference to the internet cliche ‘this meeting should have been an email,’ he claims that 20% to 30% of meetings are unnecessary and could instead be accomplished through written communication. He also backs ‘asynchronous work,’ which reduces the need for real-time information sharing.