CEO of slack utilizes the latest opportunity to attack email – CEO Stewart Butterfield says that email is not suitable for a digital-first workplace.
CEO Of Slack Utilizes Latest Opportunity to Attack Email
The CEO and founder of Slack have now made his intention made for his plans to replace email as the de facto medium of communication in workplaces.
During the keynote session at slack Frontiers in London where he was speaking, the CEO, Stewart Butterfield highlighted the various limitations of the email format, which he says is bound by nature to create opportunities for both miscommunication and misunderstanding.
“With email, we each have our own partial, fragmented, incomplete view of what’s going on,” he said to the audience. “But if you take all of those email messages and put them inside of channels, now you have somewhere for everything that’s important inside your company.”
Butterfield says that the drop-off in the value of email has coincided with the said decline in the significance of physical business headquarters which has also been pioneered by what Slack sees as the ‘digital HQ’.
He further explained that “By digital HQ, we mean the digital infrastructure that supports collaboration; that set of systems and tools and processes that has allowed organizations to continue to work and thrive during the pandemic.”
“A digital HQ isn’t a nice-to-have, nor even a must-have, but rather something that every organization already has, but could be doing a whole lot more with.”
The Importance of Optimizing Communication and Collaboration over Digital Platforms According To Slack
Slack says that the importance of optimizing communication and collaboration over digital platforms is crafted out clearly in the data. And according to a survey that was conducted by the company, even the employees that are spending the smallest time on communication-based tasks are making use of a third of their day in sending emails and messages, attend to video meetings and so many more.
Butterfield added that “With the realization that most of our work is powered by the digital HQ, which is much easier to ‘renovate’ than the physical HQ, we could all be doing more. The message is that we should be continually pushing the boundaries and experimenting because there are real opportunities for improvement,”
Slack is leaning into the strength of its collaboration platform
Slack in its efforts in leaning into the strength of its collaboration platform, versus email-based communication, the company has rolled out a couple of new features ever since the beginning of the pandemic.
And the company most recently lifted the lid on Slack Canvas which is a tool that gives you a new way to organize collectively and share data across highly customizable and persistent information panels. These ‘canvases’ as you should know are attached by default to every piece of the channel and also can manually be created for one-off projects or even events.
Slack is Bringing Video to Its Impromptu Meeting Feature Huddles
The company slack also announced just last month that it will be bringing video to its impromptu meeting feature known as Huddles. The purpose of this is to help break down the lengthy meetings that are quite needless by giving to customers a lightweight means of checking in with colleagues.
Butterfield explained that the hope he is leaning on here is that features such as this one will help customers to make out the most of their digital HQ and then put them in a stronger position in taking advantage of a period of great opportunity.
He said “I don’t think the window is closing quite yet, but against the backdrop of so much change, people are willing to tolerate more. So this is a great moment to [experiment and innovate].”
