An app which may sink email

People in the tech industry have been digging a grave for email for more than a decade, but their predictions have always seemed a little out of touch. Email, despite its terrible, horrible, no-good impact on our daily lives, is wonderfully ubiquitous, accessible, forgiving and still apparently a good business. In the last year, Amazon, Dropbox, Google and Microsoft have all announced new email initiatives.

Yet, despite email’s admirable endurance, it’s possible to envision a future in which email – remarkably – is supplanted by new tools that allow people to collaborate in big groups and force upon companies the sort of radical information transparency that many in the tech industry, at least, believe is essential.

Slack is a collaboration and communication tool that has drawn inspiration from Internet Relay Chat, an early web tool that was a chat room at its core. Slack, – a start-up with an app to foster business collaboration – is valued at $1.1 billion. The best example of that new sort of communication system comes from Slack, a start-up in San Francisco. It looks similar to several other group chat apps you’ve used before – think AOL Instant Messenger or the nerdier Internet Relay Chat, better known by its initials, IRC.

But Slack has a few unusual features that make it perfectly suited for work, including automatic archiving of all your interactions, a good search engine and the ability to work across just about every device you use. Because it is hosted online and is extremely customisable, Slack is also easy for corporate technology departments to set up and maintain.

These features have helped turn Slack into one of the fastest-growing business applications in history. After only a year in operation, Slack now serves about half a million workers every day as a partial replacement for email, instant messaging and face-to-face meetings. Its base of users is doubling every three months, according to Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s co-founder and chief executive. Butterfield predicts that by the end of the year, two to three million workers around the world will be using Slack.

While the company offers a free version, it makes money by charging businesses a monthly fee of $6.50 or more per user to gain additional features. Butterfield says the company is not yet profitable, but its monthly losses are “a couple hundred thousand dollars a month,” relatively small for a start-up that employs more than 100 people. Slack raised $120 million last fall in an investment that valued the company at more than $1 billion.

Perhaps more impressive than the pace of Slack’s growth is its scope. Slack is being used as the primary means of communication at companies of every size across a range of industries. Customers include Comcast, Walmart, Blue Bottle Coffee, a large number of start-ups and several media companies, including The New York Times.

Slack is hardly alone in trying to create a better way to communicate at work. Google and Microsoft, as well as upstarts like the cloud storage provider Box, the productivity software company Quip and the project-management system Asana, are trying to do something similar. There are also several direct competitors to Slack, including HipChat.

Behind Slack’s rise is Butterfield’s grand vision for the future of the office. He is betting that solo work is on the wane and that as all  of our jobs become more complex, more creative and technical feats will be accomplished by teams rather than lone practitioners. To be effective in such an environment, workers will have to become adept at navigating complex team dynamics, and doing so will depend on the sort of nuanced, intimate communication that you can’t get from email. Collaboration also demands another factor in modern workplaces, what Butterfield calls transparency.

“That can be a loaded political term, but we just mean being able to see into different parts of the organisation, which turns out to be important,” Butterfield said. Though it is possible to speak privately in Slack, by default everything you say is visible to everyone else at your company, even people in other departments – a system that Butterfield argues allows for greater collaboration across different parts of a company. Most discussions in Slack are also archived and made searchable.

As a result, over time, the chats build up into a corpus of deep historical knowledge. It is an archive that in Butterfield’s view becomes an important way for people – especially new employees – to understand what’s going on at a company. “Being able to scroll back over the last couple weeks, you get a whole bunch of ‘soft knowledge’ about how the company operates – how people relate to one another at this company, who knows the answers to most questions, who really makes the decisions,” he said.

A communication system offering such radical transparency may shock many workers. Some may resent the idea of their bosses or far-flung colleagues peering in on their discussions. Slack drew some criticism last year when it announced that in its plans for the largest enterprises, it would let tech departments archive workers’ private communications for legal compliance reasons.

Pains of adjusting
Even beyond matters of privacy, there will be pains of adjusting. Because Slack usually comes into a company that is already using email, some workers may resent it for being just another thing to check. And workers who thrived in the buttoned-up world of the well-written email may not feel as comfortable in Slack’s playground, one often dominated by constant, ubiquitous connection and the dashed-off quip accompanied by an emoji or a ridiculous animated GIF. But Butterfield’s beliefs fit with the notion, pushed by organisational scholars, that the free flow of information makes companies more effective.

“What we know about organisations in general is that the more knowledge workers have, the more likely it is they make better decisions, and the more likely it is you’ll feel invested in the work,” said James O’Toole, a professor at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business who has studied the benefits of transparency in the workplace. The idea that workers should chat more freely has become a mainstay of Silicon Valley culture.

“Now, thanks to technology, we have almost a second layer of the business that doesn’t have a hierarchy– it’s much more of a web,” said Aaron Levie, the chief executive of Box, whose tools allow for a similar sort of sharing. “What it means is that you have to be more collaborative instead of hoarding information, which is no longer the way that you add value.”

I’ve noticed this with Slack at The Times. One danger of my job, as a columnist who works in California, is a feeling of disconnection from the mother ship in New York. Using Slack, I can peer into discussions that would never have been accessible to me. I can see how the producers and editors who are handling my column are discussing how to present it, and how the team overseeing the home page is thinking about my work.What’s more, I have a feeling of intimacy with co-workers on the other side of the country that is almost fun. That’s a big deal, for a job.