Name: How Slack is reimagining organic interactions
Uploaded: 2020-10-27
Duration: 3 min 35 s
Description: Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield discusses the changing nature of work and communication.

 ANDREW NUSCA: Stuart, I'm interested to hear how Slack is reimagining some of the more organic interactions, such as bumping into each other in the hallway, things like that, to ensure the foundation of the relationship is being tended to in the work from home environment. STEWART BUTTERFIELD: Yeah, so there's two things that we're doing on the product side that we announced at our user conference a couple of weeks ago. One of them you can think of more or less exactly as Instagram stories. And that might sound absurd or it might sound really interesting, and I'm not sure, depending on who you are, but it's actually been pretty magical. Because the same people who you're sick of seeing in yet another conference call, I don't know what it is, it's you can pause the video whenever you want. You're not on video yourself. People kind of hold themselves in a different way or communicate in a different way, when they're not worried about being watched in the moment. And so the way that they end up speaking feels different, whatever it is. A lot of these interactions-- I don't even know what to call it-- moments of viewing the video, content consumption-- that sounds disgusting-- these moments end up kind of delightful in a way, where they're not exasperating, but they're tiring, I guess, in the video conference sense. And because Slack is already aggregated the attention of users into channels and the channels correspond to whatever people are working on, there's really a natural place for that to happen. The other one is always on audio. And I think this probably goes more to the heart of the question. You can imagine I would shout across to someone one row and two desks over and ask them a question. And everyone would overhear it. We want to create a little bit of that not interrupting people, of course, but you tune into the audio. So rather than have a call be a thing that starts and ends and that's scheduled for a specific time, it's you join and leave whenever you want. And when you're joined, you have your speakers on. And you're not necessarily speaking, but if someone arrives and starts speaking, you hear them. And so it allows for these spontaneous conversations, which sometimes can be a more effective way to communicate or a more effective way to resolve something. But the threshold of having to schedule something or to actually call someone, it feels like there's a certain amount of importance that has to have. For me to call someone-- telephones are a different thing, I guess, but for me to call someone on Slack, or on Zoom, or teams, or anything without telling them in advance, it feels a little bit like an emergency, but it's definitely an intrusion, whereas this kind of situation where people are floating in and out, I think is really much more organic, allows for a lot more spontaneity, a lot more of the serendipity. And then the last thing I would say is our quarter closes on Friday. And from noon, until like 11:00 PM, it is just chaos with the sales ops team, and legal, finance, the sales leadership, all these contracts going back and forth, and having this kind of system, where there's just always on way to participate and get the latest is I think going to be really impactful. So far we seem to be impactful for similar things, for launches of features, and teams working really tightly together. So those are two. Those are from us. I think the world is going to produce a lot more. We're going to continue to innovate and produce more. I can really imagine two years from now we end up with not a whole new set of tools, but a lot of augmentation to what we have today. 

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield discusses the changing nature of work and communication.