pandemic, Slack's executive team was dialed into our regular weekly staff meeting. We were 45 minutes into what was becoming a very frustrating conversation about office reopenings, remote work policies, time zone guidelines for hiring plans, regional compensation adjustments, and a host of other topics that are by now quite familiar to company leaders in nearly every industry.
We were talking past each other, seemingly disagreeing about the most basic aspects of the future we imagined, until our Chief People Officer, Nadia Rawlinson, stopped the conversation: “Hold on: when you ask ‘what's going to be different?’ are you talking about different from February 2020? Or different from today? It matters because the answers take you in opposite directions.”
She was right. Human brains love shortcuts, and it is much easier to imagine the future as just like the past, except for one small difference. For every “we'll go into the office two days each week,” there's an implicit assumption: “… but otherwise things will be more or less the same as February 2020.” But that assumption is wrong, not least of all because it presupposes every employee lives within commuting distance of an office. The world has already moved on.
When you think about the future of work as evolving from our present “normal,” things look quite a bit better. Starting from the baseline of the surprisingly impressive performance we've seen with nearly every office worker working from home, we get two new, big advantages. The first, as the pandemic subsides and we learn to better negotiate the ongoing risks and trade-offs, will be a fuller return of the amenities of regular life. More travel, more togetherness, and less risk to our physical health will mean better mental health and happier lives for all.
The second advantage will be the return of in-person communication and collaboration as one of the tools available for us to get work done. This will help in forming relationships, building trust, and approaching certain kinds of creative work. Even after the pent-up demand for seeing colleagues in person subsides, regular time spent together face-to-face will play a key role in the experience of most knowledge workers, including most of those who otherwise prefer to work remotely 100% of the time.
Nadia's question shifted the conversation into the kind of engaged debate that was more characteristic of our normal discussions. In subsequent conversations with dozens of customers, along with fellow software CEOs and industry observers, I've noticed increasing receptivity to an optimistic and open-minded approach to the future of work.
The pandemic highlighted the fact that most organizations had already switched from a mode of operation where digital technologies supplemented in-person communication, to a world where in-person supplements the digital. Now we just need to get our mindsets caught up to that Digital-First reality.
The opportunity we have today is enormous. No adage has proven itself more true in my career than “never waste a crisis,” and no crisis has been bigger than this. This is a chance to reimagine how work gets done, to break bad old habits, and make work better for people and companies.
Like the scientists say, you can't unscramble an egg. We need to start thinking about the future we want, given where we are today. We need to avoid falling back to assumptions about a familiar remembered past that is not coming back. My hope is that more leaders will think about this time—and the unforeseeable set of circumstances—as an invitation to get creative, to experiment, to invent, and to take advantage of what will surely be the biggest single opportunity we'll have in our lifetimes to make fundamental changes to how we work. And helping leaders navigate the way forward was one of the reasons I was excited to help launch Future Forum, a consortium backed by Slack.
We all know that work can be more fulfilling, less stressful, more pleasant, and more productive. The purpose of this book is to help you make that happen.
— Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and CEO of Slack
Introduction: The 9-To-5 Just Doesn’t Work for Us Anymore (And Maybe Never Did)
When Slack, the enterprise messaging platform, was founded, co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield lived in Vancouver, and the company's other founders were located in New York and San Francisco. Together they built a product that enables distributed work among distributed teams, but even still the company's primary headquarters was established in San Francisco. Because, of course it was. “If you want to do inter-bank finance, you have to go to London. If you want to start a giant media company, you have to be in New York. If you want to do movie production, you have to be in Los Angeles,” Butterfield told an interviewer way back in 2018.1 If you want to start a tech company, you have to be in the San Francisco Bay Area, or so the thinking went at the time, at Slack and so many other companies. Indeed, it wasn't long before Butterfield moved to San Francisco himself, so he could be closer to the heart of both the company and the entire tech world.
Despite the fact that the Slack product was designed to allow people to work collaboratively in a virtual forum, at the end of 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the vast majority of the company's engineering staff—79%—were located in the San Francisco Bay area, with only 2% working remotely. The organization wasn't against flexible work per se. There were those high-performers who, once they'd applied, were granted permission to work that way, and occasionally they would hire someone from outside the area. But, as co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Cal Henderson admits, “I was definitely skeptical of it.” At the time it was important to company leaders that they have a cohesive group of people located in the same place and coming into the office on a set schedule so they could collaborate and do innovative work.
But that way of thinking caused some challenges. It made hiring more difficult. With rare exceptions, people had to live near Slack offices or be willing to move, despite the high cost of local real estate. When employees wanted to move away, typically for family reasons or to pursue a better quality of life in less expensive locales, the company often lost talented people. “We tried to accommodate really exceptional people when there was no other alternative, but we also let some exceptional people go,” Butterfield recalls.
That's essentially where the company was at when the pandemic hit, offices closed basically overnight, and everyone was forced into a kind of grand experiment. Just like we have seen with company after company, in industry after industry, the nature of work changed.
In the beginning, the focus of Slack's leaders was simply on productivity, on how people could continue to achieve pre-set goals in these altered circumstances. They paid close attention to the metrics as things unfolded, and to everyone's surprise, they quickly found that overall, output, quality, and reliability remained strong. “It was surprising how well we continued to operate,” Henderson says. Even still, there were some significant variations across teams depending on their circumstances. Parents with young kids, those dealing with health challenges in the family, or those with poor work setups and internet connections struggled more, for obvious reasons. But as the company got better at identifying where problems existed and what those problems were, they were able to provide help—giving people support, space, even equipment—and the outlook continued to improve.
In the beginning, most companies—most people, in fact—thought the shift would be temporary, but as lockdowns were extended, most workers began settling into a rhythm—and not just at Slack, but at numerous companies we worked with during the period. They also made some discoveries about the conventional wisdom that had previously dictated so much of how we worked—and, oftentimes, that “wisdom” just didn't hold up. Because so much of how people were used to working was based on the idea of being present together in space and time, there was an assumption that these things were necessary for collaboration and innovation. Many had relied on whiteboards for brainstorming sessions, for example, but when forced to find another way, solutions—often simple ones—presented themselves. Team members at Slack began brainstorming in an online document where everyone, in their
