What is Slack?
Slack is a mobile application and website used for business, groups, organizations and non-profits to communicate to each other effectively and transparently, without using email. With over 10 million active users a day, slack is looking to disrupt an email market that hasn’t changed in over 30+ years. Slack continues to change the process of how we communicate with each other at work. With the increase of technology and workspaces changing rapidly, slack has continued to stay up-to-date with the latest platforms. Additionally, it has recently soared to the top of communication work-place channels.
The image below shows the growth of Slack since it formed as a company in 2013.
According to Slack, the growth of their company is largely driven by demand at every level. Slack makes it much easier to achieve the kind of alignment that makes people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. They increase transparency across teams and whole organizations. People experience their work becoming connected to that of their colleagues, whether they’re on the other side of the building or the other side of the world. Additionally, Slack brings people, data, and applications into a single place where people can effectively work together, find important information, and get more out of the software they use every day through integrations with Slack.
Medium.com explains it best, “Slack is a meeting space, water-cooler, bulletin board, and phone-tree for your whole organizing team. It’s a great place to coordinate and collaborate, and a fun place to get to know your fellow organizers and activists, even when you can’t all be in the same room at the same time. It’s a tool that you can use on your computer and your phone to stay in touch with your team, and keep everyone up to date with the important news and goings-on.”
“No app is going to be totally magic. Slack might work for your team’s work style, and it might not. But it’s definitely worth checking out.”
How is Slack disrupting processes in the workplace?
As we’ve discussed in class, process improvement and innovation are extremely important in making a business or organization successful. The better processes you have, the more successful your company will be and the more pleased your employees and users will be. Process improvement allows for users and employees, two very important factors, to assist in improving the company and application. Furthermore, it assists employees in clearly map their goals, quality transparency, and good team morale.
Slack feels that employees need a better communication platform besides messaging that will allow for improved communications in the work place. In my organization we’ve started using Slack for a plethora of reasons. While we still use email for any type of official communications, Slack is a good back-pocket platform to chat with colleagues and it works for our work style.
Sources:
https://medium.com/ragtag-notes/what-is-slack-5075511f6056
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/style/slack-replace-email-ipo-listing.html
https://slackhq.com/slack-has-10-million-daily-active-users
https://www.statista.com/chart/6643/daily-active-users-of-slack/
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