Slack is not asynchronous
As someone who has worked for partially and fully distributed organizations for almost a decade, every company I’ve worked for has used workplace chat. My career began using Hipchat (RIP) and Slack arrived a year later, quickly becoming the de-facto tool for small and growing startups.
I loved how expressive Slack felt thanks to emojis and gifs. Today, Microsoft Teams and Slack are used by hundreds of millions of people across the world. Last week, Google launched chat as part of Workspace, a competing product baked into GSuite which highlights the reality that workplace chat is now a de-facto communication tool for work.
Slack in particular is a useful collaboration tool. It helps organizations coordinate work from a distance, including my company. Instead of sending emails back and forth, I use Slack instead. It’s much more efficient for internal, real-time collaboration.
I want to see more companies shift to a work-from-anywhere model, so I’m grateful for tools like Slack as many people would be going back to the office right now if they didn’t exist. Workplace chat is the gateway drug for office-centric cultures to begin shifting towards a remote-first model.
