Office time is not for video calls, employees must collaborate, connect in person: Slack CEO

The CEO of the messaging platformSlackbelieves that businesses should reconsider how employees spend their time at work. With the popularity of hybrid working, many people now split their workweek between being at home and going to the office.

Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, contends that working in office should be a chance to accomplish tasks that are impossible to complete at home. Not one of them, he claims, is working at a desk while using headphones.

It goes without saying that the CEO of an online messaging service won't go so far as to advise colleagues to leave their laptops at home, but he does remark that doing so would "draw a sharp line in the sand about what the purpose of being together is."

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The US, Canada, Japan, Australia, and India all host Slack's corporate offices, reports BBC.

Reflecting on its offices before the pandemic,Butterfield says: "The 80% of the floor space that we dedicated to kind of factory-farm, battery-chicken housing for people to use their desks all by themselves and listen to their headphones, and not talk to anyone else... was a bit of a waste."

He claims that ongoing changes are making the Slack office more like a social club since he wants employees to come to work to collaborate and forconnections in person.

"The best thing we can do is create a comfortable environment for people to come together and actually enjoy themselves," he says.

In addition, he believes that young individuals just starting their careers often prefer to work in an office environment with their peers and recognises that some people will choose to work full-time in an office setting because they cannot or do not want to work from home.

Butterfield is really not a huge admirer of meetings.

He supports Jeff Bezos's proposal from Amazon, wherein attendees read a six-page document as a briefing note at the beginning of a meeting rather than listening to PowerPoint presentations.

"There probably are 20% or 30% (of meetings) that don't actually have to be meetings, that would be more effective with written communication," he says, in a nod to the internet meme "this meeting should have been an email".

He also supports "asynchronous work," which minimises the need for information to be shared in real time.

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