Office time is not for video calls, says tech boss

Businesses should rethink the way employees spend their time in the office, says the head of messaging platform Slack.

With the advent of hybrid work, many people split their work week between being at home and commuting to work.

But being in the office should be an opportunity to do things that aren’t possible at home, argues Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield.

Sitting at a desk with headphones on is not one of them, he says.

Of course, the boss of an online messaging platform isn’t going to go so far as to say employees should leave their laptops at home, but he says it would “draw a strong line on what the purpose of getting together is.” .

Slack has headquarters in the US, Canada, Japan, Australia and India.

Referring to his pre-pandemic offices, Mr Butterfield says: “The 80% of the floor space we have dedicated to sort of factory farm and chicken farming so people can use their desks all by themselves and listen to their headphones and not talk to anyone else. .. was a bit of a waste.”

Ongoing renovations are making Slack’s workspace more like that of a social club, he says, because he wants people to come to work to collaborate and build personal connections.

“The best thing we can do is create a comfortable environment where people can come together and really enjoy themselves,” he says.

He accepts that some people choose to work full-time in an office because they cannot or do not want to work from home, and also believes that young people starting their careers generally prefer to be in the office with their peers are.

“It’s hard to imagine starting your career fresh out of university, not going into the office and not being able to meet all these people in person,” he says.

“But I think the majority of knowledge workers will settle into some sort of pattern of regular meetings over time.”

Mr. Butterfield really isn’t a big fan of meetings.

He champions Amazon’s idea, pioneered by Jeff Bezos, where each participant reads a six-page memo as a briefing note at the start of a meeting, rather than sitting through PowerPoint presentations.

“There’s probably 20% or 30%[of meetings]that don’t really need to be meetings that would be more effective with written communication,” he says, referring to the Internet meme “that meeting should have been an email.”

It also supports what he calls “asynchronous work” – minimizing the need to share information in real time.

“So like people walking around the room giving their status update if you can do that asynchronously and I can record mine at 08:17 and then listen to yours at 09:53 or whatever – that’s worth a lot in itself,” he says.

“I think the place where most teams can invest is in how they do asynchronous work because we’re human.”

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