By j christopher stanger on January 15, 2019
When Slack emerged on the Mobile Communications scene in 2013 it promised businesses a way for workers to communicate anywhere, anytime, share files, meet, set schedules and track projects. It promised to both improve ‘productivity’ and provide ‘efficiencies’. From a mobile culture perspective, apps such as Slack have also become the office ‘water coolers’ of the 21st century.
Scan through your office communications app – Slack, Hangouts, Teams – and you will see chat channels about everything from movies, fitness, food/wine, humour… all alongside work related communications. The archeology of this digital chatter mirrors that of face to face communication in most work places. And this is generally pretty healthy. People are communicating regularly with one another socially as they get their business done. Like office talk, the positive side of these apps includes building cohesion in work teams and establishing a positive sense of collegial culture and belonging in a department – even when ‘departments’ span time zones.
Of course, there are some downsides to these communication apps. Some folks have trouble curtailing the chat, feeling the need to respond to every message in a group channel. Some folk lose their filter, snipe and gossip. Mobile messenger apps can also invade personal time outside of work, thus blurring the line between work and personal life. These apps also track chat time from a data perspective, which allows employers to gauge who is being ‘productive’ and who is spending the company dime on chat.
Ultimately, office chatter has always existed – the good and the bad. It is just no longer always physically around ‘the water cooler’. These online tools afford workers an ability to engage in office relationships anywhere and anytime and, actually, all on their own terms, which is in many ways a good thing!
Below are a few short articles on this topic that might be interesting to you.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90236583/the-slackification-of-work
https://www.magzter.com/articles/5731/226034/59355ad3a3292
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/what-has-slack-done-to-the-office.html
I personally really like the Slackification of office culture. Although it definitely blurs the lines between work and social time, it also allows people at work to collaborate asynchronously when they are working apart from each other. When working as a teacher, having the ability to ask another teacher in your school a question, or to talk about the details of an extracurricular activity, may be impossible without these modern ‘watercoolers’. For people who work in high pressure/high stress environments, it lightens the cognitive load, by instigating task communication with a peer. With so many activities to accomplish, commitments can sometimes be buried by the demands on the rest of the day. That being said, maybe it’s not healthy to have to so many things on the go that we need a tool like this? But that’s more of a workplace demand issue.
I once went to NYC for a teacher conference, and the app that was given to us to communicate on was Whova. Like Slack, in Whova you can make a variety of subs, where teachers could plan dinners, walks in the park, or any other types of networking activities to suit their fancy. I like how water cooler apps are allowing us to network in more organic ways instead of just networking just to make professional connections.
This post stood out to me as my school currently became “slackified” due to our transition to working remotely. During our transition online with students most teachers in my school took to Microsoft Teams and the staff followed suit with our school staff Team. Teams has now become our office culture as various channels have been created to gather around the “21st century water cooler”. I like how Christopher made the connection to the “water cooler” as many offices transition online and found a need for a communication tool such as Slack and Teams. Christopher mentions the pros and cons of Slackification including a blurring of lines between work and home as work can be available in the palm of your hand. As my school has only made the transition to Teams during this time of remote learning I find that line very blurred, does anyone have experience with this pre-pandemic?
My partner works in the tech industry and has been using apps like Slack for years already, is education behind the times with online staff communication or was there not a need prior to remote learning? I would love to hear other perspectives on Slackification.