A New Zealand real-estate firm has introduced a four-day working week. There are moves to rein in the tyranny of Slack. “Our research exposes the reality: ‘flexible work boundaries’ often turn into ‘work without boundaries,’ compromising an employee’s and their family’s health and well-being.” “’Always on’ organizational culture is often unaccounted for or disguised as a benefit,” the report says. “A lot of people don’t have a regular nine-to-five where they switch off at the end of the day.”Ī study on 142 employees in 2018, co-authored by William Becker, a Virginia Tech associate professor, highlights the negative impacts of ‘always on’ culture. “There are many things that culminated to this culture of overwork,” says Hannah Elderfield, senior behavioral analyst at consumer behavioral insights firm, Canvas8. Notifications can be muted and basic hygiene factors - like auto-deleting channels, restricting new channel creation and mentioning people in channels rather than direct messaging - make it more manageable. Companies can structure and monitor their Slack use. It’s worth repeating that it’s not Slack at fault but the way people use it. When it takes roughly 25 minutes to return to a task, this is obviously terrible for productivity. An average Slack user gets a message - either direct or in a channel they are active in - every two to three minutes. In a company of 1,000 employees, there is, on average, one channel per user, according to research by Time is Ltd. The problem, he adds, is overcommunication, when people use Slack as a chat rather than a communication channel. “The structure of how time is spent within companies we see first in their Slack data, so it’s a prequel and a sequel of all communication, and that’s a good thing,” says Jan Rezab, CEO and founder of Time is Ltd., which helps organizations improve productivity. When Slack experienced an outage for a few hours on June 27, 2018, those who had RescueTime, productivity tracking software, installed on their browsers behaved in a more productive way. But a broader emphasis on striking a better work-life balance means some people, and companies, are communicating elsewhere.Ī common critique of workplace messaging is that they distract. In a lot of cases, these claims are not distinctive to Slack. Since then, Slack has been criticized for fueling unproductivity, shirking privacy, allegedly not taking harassment seriously enough and, perhaps most unfairly, for blurring the lines between work and socializing.
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