Work from home could hasten demise of email, says Slack CEO

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As remote working becomes the ‘new normal’ due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic email is likely to become further superseded as the business communication tool of choice.

“What’s happened here is that we have skipped a couple of years in what’s an inevitable transition away from inboxes and from an individual approach to a team approach,” Slack CEO and founder, Stewart Butterfield, told The Age newspaper.

“The email is not going to go away because it has its uses but, frankly, it’s a terrible choice in these sort of dynamic situations,” Butterfield added.

Anyone who has been trying to set up and access their work emails from home in recent weeks and months can vouch for the truth of this.

Slack ¬– a workplace messaging service – has become increasing popular since the pandemic has taken hold and is set to reap the benefits, along with similar tools such as Microsoft’s collaborative platform, Teams, and video conferencing tools like Zoom and Click Meeting.

As more and more people embrace working from home the number of people using Slack has increased commensurately, with over 12 million users across the globe, The Age reported.

“This is not just the regular work from home transition, this is working in a pandemic and a big challenge for a lot of people who have never had a home office.

“In many ways we were built for this, not necessarily for working from home, but certainly for creating the sort of alignment inside an organisation that delivers transparency and allows organisations to be more capable of dealing with disruption,” Butterfield said.