![]() ![]() That points to one of the big failures of workplace chat tools. I suspect this would have happened anyway, and not just in American media groups.īut I do think the Weiss letter underlines one of the most irksome problems with systems such as Slack: They splinter communication, especially inside big companies that need it more than ever now that so many staff are working from home.Ī friend of mine at a large firm moaned often before the pandemic about the need to constantly check for important work news on email and Slack, along with Google chat, Facebook Workplace and a slew of other platforms that had crept relentlessly into his office. Some analysts think this means that Slack and its like are fuelling a “bottom-up revolution” in US media companies, where younger staffers use the tools to organise and demand change. To generalise greatly, workers who grew up texting or WhatsApp-ing instead of phoning or emailing gravitate easily to a system such as Slack but their bosses often do not. But I am willing to bet that not every senior manager was as glued to Slack as much as those who did the writing. ![]() I have no idea who wrote what about Ms Weiss on it inside the New York Times, nor do I know whether her bosses should have done something about it. Use has jumped during the pandemic as people working from home have struggled to stay in touch.ĭaily messages sent rose by an average of 20 per cent per user worldwide between February 1 and March 25.īut here is the thing about Slack and its growing number of rivals: Not everyone who has it uses it. More than 750,000 companies (including Financial Times) have signed up for it and at least 12 million people use it actively each day. At its stock market debut last year, it hit US$20 billion. ![]() If you have never used it, imagine a souped-up version of WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger that makes it easy to chat with people across your company 24 hours a day.īy 2015, Slack was valued at nearly US$3 billion. I mention 2014 because that was the official launch year for Slack, the increasingly inescapable office instant messaging system. Then she wrote a sentence that would have made no sense before 2014: “My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels.” Last week a prominent New York Times columnist named Bari Weiss wrote a letter to the paper’s publisher to say she was quitting.Ī “new McCarthyism” had taken root in the newsroom, she claimed, and her “wrongthink” views on what were deemed to be the “right causes” had spurred “constant bullying” from co-workers whose behaviour had gone unpunished. ![]()
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