by Ellen Cushing published in The Atlantic
Read original on The Atlantic's website
Cushing reviews the rise of Slack and how it has i...Show description
Posted 1058 days ago
As someone who uses Slack on an everyday basis, and has for the past 5 years or so, I have to agree with nearly everything Cullen writes. Not only about work, but also about our personal lives and our connection to work. She writes:
Slack is fun. Sometimes, when I am watching television or standing in line at the grocery store, I find my thumb absentmindedly moving over to Slack, the same way it does with Instagram and Candy Crush. I assure you it’s not because I’m a hard worker.
This is so true - I often do the same thing. But the reason for doing so is that in our shift to remote work, our time has also been freed up to organize ourselves. We are not jamming all that we can while we are at the office. Sometimes, I will go to the store in the middle of the day to clear my head and get back to work later. Or maybe I do something else during the day, head to the store at night, and just make sure that I wrapped up all my work while standing in line (no open Slack threads, for example).
As for Slack at work, again she is spot on. I have been at companies with private message groups where employees discuss issues about their bossess or the direction of the company more broadly. But as people have pointed out, you have to be delicate, because those messages can always be read by adminstrators later on. But that is good! Instead of being a "bully" or saying ridiculous things, you can still have a company private Slack channel dedicated to critiques, but those should be thoughtful and helpful for cooworkers. The problem is that because Slack seems like any other form of social media, sometimes people forget and they can write things that they never would have said out loud in a business setting.
And there are people who don't have any Slack etiquette whatsoever. They post gifs, ping directly, say silly things in the wrong settings - but when you meet with those people in the real world they often do the same! Slack is sort of an extension of our personalities, allowing us to sort of "be ourselves," which can both be beneficial and harmful for our careers. People's intelligence can be discovered on Slack, or, on the contrary, people's idiocacy. I have seen people post things in rage, and then edit them to make it better, or forget to edit them within the specified time frame and then their silly comment is left for everybody to see forever.