- According to Slack’s CEO due to the popularity of hybrid working, employees now split their time between working from home and going to the office.
- He also refers to the ongoing renovations in his office resembling a social club.
- He also promotes amazon’s strategy to a written or spoken brief rather than sitting through power point presentations.
According to the CEO of the messaging platform Slack, businesses should reconsider how their employees spend their time in the workplace, Who spoke to the BBC in a recent interview.
Hybrid working
With the popularity of hybrid working, many people now split their workweek between being at home and going to the office.
“However, being at work should provide an opportunity to do things that cannot be done at home, sitting at a desk with your headphones on is not one of them,” said Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s CEO.
Getting together
Of course the boss of an online messaging platform is not going to go so far as to say staff should leave their laptops at home, but he does say it would “put a strong line in the sand about what the purpose is of getting together”. Slack has headquarters in the US, Canada, Japan, Australia and India.
“80% of the floor space that we dedicated to factory-farm, battery-chicken housing for people to use their desks all by themselves and listen to their headphones, and not talk to anyone else… was a bit of a waste,” Mr. Butterfield said reflecting upon his offices before the pandemic.
A comfortable environment
“Ongoing renovations are resembling a social club, because he wants people to come to work to collaborate and build relationships face-to-face.”
“The best thing we can do is create a comfortable environment for people to gather and actually have fun,” he says.
Start of career
“I think some people will decide to work a full-time job at an office because they can’t or don’t want to work from home, and I also think that young people just starting their careers prefer to work in an office environment with their peers.”
Knowledge workers
“It’s hard to imagine starting your career fresh out of university, and not going to the office, and not being able to meet all these people in person.”
“But I think the majority of knowledge workers, over time, will settle into some sort of pattern of regular intervals of getting together,” he says.
Written communications
Meetings are not something Mr Butterfield enjoys.
He promotes Amazon’s idea, introduced by Jeff Bezos, in which each attendee reads a six-page memo as a briefing note at the start of a meeting rather than sitting through PowerPoint presentations.
“There are probably 20% or 30% of meetings that don’t need to be meetings and would be more effective with written communication,” he says, referring to the internet meme “this meeting should have been an email.”
Asynchronous Work
He also supports “asynchronous work,” which reduces the need to share information in real time.
“For example, people going 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 is worth a lot,” he says.
“I believe that most teams should invest in how they do asynchronous work, because we’re all humans.”
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Source:- BBC
