Product Takes: Slack vs. Microsoft Teams - Future of Work
1:59AM Feb 18, 2021
Speakers:
Keywords:
slack
teams
people
integrations
remote
companies
microsoft
work
office
love
human element
hear
employees
pandemic
agree
salesforce
product
point
question
foster
Make you guys, thank you so much my Leica and Chester for allowing us to host under the weekend product. We're excited. So just so everybody knows. This is all about product takes, and really the goal of this club is to foster interesting conversation so we can all learn and grow together. So, as you guys can see our, our topic today is slack versus Microsoft Teams. And we're really seeking to make this an engaging clubhouse where people can jump in. Discuss learn from each other and grow. So we'll start off with the first discussion question and don't hesitate to raise your hand and jump into the conversation. So the first question we'll ask is, if you were the product manager, what would you do to improve slack.
I can go. Yeah, so one of the things that I wished slack did a better job with and I don't use it personally regularly on a daily basis but I'd love to see some like better voice and video integration within the platform. at least when I did use slack pretty aggressively and I still use it for like my startup. There There seems to be a lack of the ability to like just talk and video, they might have changed that I think there there might have been a recent addition to it where like either be an add on or sort of another way like you might be able to call people now I'm not sure if it's video as well. But I know that like when slack first came out, that was one of like the major like downsides of it from my point of view.
I can confirm as a startup that uses slack that they've gotten a lot better at their video conferencing capabilities. I'm sure everybody in this room has had an issue with Google meats at some point in their career. So, one of our one of our big pluses as an early stage startup was when we finally upgraded to a pro slack plan. We could just do impromptu video conferencing there instead of relying on Google needs. Complete completely agree with you guys there Tatyana thanks so much for raising your hand, we see that you're a technical product manager at slack and so, yeah, we'd love to hear your take on this discussion and yeah please feel free to jump in.
Thanks, and I want to actually thank Malacca for inviting me earlier we were in a chat. Earlier today, and she told me about this discussion which is very close to my heart. So,
absolutely. Yeah, well
I can, I can also confirm slack has had in calling within the app for for a minute, and these are all great points and definitely things worth thinking about. Oh and I should I should qualify. I do work at slack. I'm a technical program manager there, and I work on the ecosystem of features that enables external collaboration on slack called slack Connect, and I'm happy to chat with you all my opinions are my own, I have to say, though.
Thank you so much for that Tatyana. I think one of the key questions that comes up in everybody's mind and anybody who's a speaker if you have an opinion on this please raise your hand. One of the key questions I think when you're assessing which one of these products to choose is which one's better at scale. And so I'd love to hear your guys's thoughts there so far based off of your experience.
I can jump in at least from my own experience initially so I ran a social app called free so very much in the early startup tech phase. And we were looking to scale our team. Slightly we started off with slack. And it was great for fostering those conversations, but just the second off of use that and I'm sure like you said Tatyana This is something you guys are working on. We really thought that we needed a better way to have video calls using slack so really trying to develop the relationships within the team that was something that we thought could potentially be improved. But yeah, I'd love to hear your guys's takes here either on what you would do to improve slack or what you would do to improve Microsoft Teams if you were the product manager. I do think that
one of the,
one of the first things that I do and I may be biased because I'm somebody coming to clubhouse and using an audio first app is. I've always felt some similarities between the organization of content on discord and organization on slack. And I really enjoy the capability of just being able to hop on and audio, an audio conversation while jumping between multiple text conversations. So I think the first thing that I would do is probably just try to make it easier, especially with the whole work from home environment I miss the ability to just, you know, tap on a developer's shoulder and ask a question and tap on a designer shoulder and ask a question. So I think the first thing that I that I would try to tackle is making it a lot easier for people to connect over audio on slack while doing other tasks and Tatyana you may know some stuff about this being in progress so there may be some features that I'm not fully aware of as a user, so I'd love to hear any jumps off of the audio topic there
as a level
lover of clubhouse. I can tell you that I personally totally understand that use case, and I can't speak to anything about our roadmap, but you make some really good points.
Thank you so much.
Profits manager, that is the most product managers to answer ever. Thank you. Thank you guys, that's
great.
I might,
I'm sorry I might mess up your name is a yo yo Leah, I'd love to hear your take here.
Oh yo Elena Yes, thank you. Thanks for having me guys. So it's really interesting because we keep on reevaluating this decision of slack versus Microsoft Teams. And I will tell you over the pandemic we've really started to almost to the point of abuse the slack, you know, kind of, let's call it app store with their extensions. We basically have every single channel that's integrated with some kind of secondary application, whether it's you know JIRA Trello various like bots for notifications that are coming in so we're pretty you know tied in with slack now where it's like, hard to switch. And one of the things I've actually like noticed more and more is that with engineering teams. They don't want to be on video right so I noticed that the majority of my majority of my actually like zoom meeting requests that happened through actually backslash invite on slack actually are coming from sales teams marketing teams and really more, you know Biz Dev, whereas you know engineering and even, you know, kind of product management now meetings are all just voice not on not via video. And so that's the differentiation that we've seen, and also what's really interesting is like the only feature on like we've really figured out how to like I said almost abuse, all the various options of like the slack marketplace for the things that we natively don't have enough of in slack. However, one feature that really, I would say, creates some pain is the ability, the lack of ability to actually screen share via phone, when you're on mobile, right. So, a lot of the time we are working on mobile apps and I want to easily screen share and screencast, you know, for people to see what's going on. And it's very difficult, unless you know I'm, I'm at my computer so that's one feature where you know it's still a pain point and that's why we talk about like Should we go on Microsoft Teams or something else. But everything else I mean we have like over probably like over 100 different integrations, through our Slack channel now so we're, we're pretty plugged in.
Would you mind just just plugging some of those integrations so I just started getting into using if this than that, a lot more just to automate some simple processes so i'd honestly love to hear a little bit more about that.
Sure. Let me actually go back to my laptop to tell you because it's actually hard to review all of them from the mobile app as well so I'll give you a few plugs in a second here maybe, Tatiana has any comments.
Oh, I mean I'm a heavy user of integrations in slack myself, both, both from an organizational standpoint but also from my individual role, you know as a TPM I'm always looking for ways to improve workflows and improve how we do our work together and so there's a bit of a meta thing that happens there. And I, I completely agree this is one of the things that makes slack incredibly powerful how extensible it is through various integrations and I'm actually curious to hear what other people. What integrations other people use, so I don't bias the room a little bit, but if you did you get your computer. Yes,
yeah yeah I'll give you a couple of fun ones right like it's actually always interesting to do the fun ones so I don't know, we really like which is kind of like an employee relationship management tool it allows you to kind of like ping different new employees that are onboarding, and it's actually been really fun to kind of do almost like a coffee lunch sort of break thing. Like in the middle of slack so we do that quite heavily. Then we have a birthday bot here that I'm looking at, which is like a birthday reminder again you're just like trying to create an office environment, right. So, we have a birthday bot which is a birthday reminder for people's birthdays and then that like opens up you know some kind of communication. Then we obviously have GitHub we have Zaid PR, we have time doctor for like time tracking for some of our contractors that they use that in in their own separate channels. And then, we actually recently I liked this one a lot too. We recently installed a simple poll with. When we want to make like team wide decisions for example like are we taking Presidents Day Off, are we working, are we doing happy hour,
you know even amongst the customer success team that's been a fun one. Of course we have giffy for various gifts and small little small little excitements.
That's the most productive one. Actually,
definitely.
The favorite.
And then I mean yeah like I'm just I'm looking through and customer IO for various like user behavior notifications so yeah it's like a lot of Google Drive Customer Success sales force. We have pocket. A lot right so, but I think I mentioned the most fun one. So I hope that helps.
Yeah, thank you so much. But like, I'd love to hear your take and then go over to Hassan and then face oh
yeah I still, you know what I can only speak to slack I cannot speak to Microsoft Teams. Like I said, I'm a heavy user of slack have used it at my at this company in the end the company prior. I remember just a quick story on on slack and its integrations. There was a time when the giffy integration. You cannot choose the gift that would get sent the very first one would would come up and go out and not all of them were safe for work. So that was very.
I made. I made myself a victim to various things because of that.
Oh my goodness. Yeah, that was those were challenging times and actually you know in in, I would say in development organizations in in engineering organizations, they're pretty forgiving but we you know one slide got used outside of engineering. That became a problem so it was very it was very good that they added the ability to shuffle and then choose the one that you want it. I think slides just the numerous integrations that it has definitely makes it useful and then also I saw I used to work at IBM. At the beginning of my career and IBM had, I think they still do. They had a chat feature called same time. and. And I don't know what it is about slack that made chatting with people, just a really delightful experience maybe it's all the integrations I'm not sure. Maybe it's because it started off as a game or was supposed to be a game. but. But yeah, I mean I'm a huge fan of slack. I don't have a lot of familiarity with teams, other than I believe it's, it's like chat and Oh, isn't it more like video conferencing.
As far as I understand, yes. One of my father's company uses teams and he says that one of the nice says that he said a lot of times that one of his favorite features is they use a lot of Microsoft products, so you don't have to use do a lot of special configuring to to make the Microsoft products work with teams. So, that may not have been the most breakthrough. Most breakthrough comments to throw out there but that's, that's my basic understanding of it.
Sorry. If you guys don't mind just like pivoting in here real fast. One of the things is not only does it work well with Microsoft products, but it's actually backed in is all built into SharePoint two. So it has a native tagging feature with documentation. So if you have certain types of documents and then you want to add short tags to them so like, let's say you're doing like statements of works or RFPs like proposals. You can tag every single proposal and then you can just search. Writing teams for proposals and then it will like bring you all of those respective tags that you've used for separate documents that you have within your own SharePoint or back end, sort of like database. So it's kind of unique from that sense
I, I mean on that point I that that may be is something to consider I've used both teams and slack. And I must say that I'm really biased towards slack. I like Slack, a lot. I don't know you know the comment was earlier is like, yeah, we don't know what's the charm about slack versus teams. I think you know the the point the main point on one versus the other is really, Whether you want to be you are bought into or whether you bought into the Microsoft technology stack and exactly the point that I think, Seth was someone was mentioning just before I started speaking is, I think, I think slack slack is, I mean, despite the fact that, you know, Microsoft is an somewhat relatively open platform not closed up like apple, but I have had experience with teams on Mac, and slack on Mac, and the ease of use of slack the simplicity the reliability of slack is second to none, on, on, on a Mac, relative to teams teams I've had hiccups sharing files, while we were on a call have had some other technical difficulties and those are some of the anecdotal issues or problems that made me, you know pretty much lean more towards slack versus teams. I think slack is a phenomenal tool, and and even during this pandemic. It really proved its, its power
inside basal Pons say tech please please jump into the conversation. Definitely.
So I completely agree with Faisal and said that I think that for for teams, and for organizations that have law buy into, like, you know, 360, Microsoft products. It makes sense it's natural to you know use teams. I think that the reason why slack so I'm very biased toward slack as well I've used both but and have kind of led the, you know, changes we started with Facebook, you know workspace and that was not great, and then we switch to teams at one point with such a slack so have gone through all them and really, I think that what what keeps a lot of startups and, you know, product teams going back to slack is kind of the gamification of it almost right so I think that slack is fun and it's customizable. The fact that you can build a culture around what goes on in slack I think it's really really powerful especially for remote teams right now. The fact that you can upload custom emojis right so we have custom emojis of people's faces and we add custom emojis as like, you know, inside jokes for the company. And you can even set like loading messages to say like you know random quotes from XYZ person at the company. And you can you know customize the colors you can add all these cool bots that if someone says XYZ thing, you can like, you know, make a joke about it right like all that customization has led to like this culture that's kind of that can be created around slack to say, hey, it's fun to kind of talk on slack and I think that's a big reason why from a from an experience perspective, we really like it better versus whenever we did use teams. It felt very much like a Microsoft product that's not to say, Microsoft products are bad, but they are what we feel is it kind of feels pricey right it's very much. You're here to kind of get the work done and that's it versus slack feels like, hey, there's this extra level of like fun to it right you can send these gifts, these custom emojis. These messages you have bots that like, you know, respond to someone saying XYZ, and you can create a culture around it, and that's kind of my thoughts about it.
I so agree with the custom emojis man like between our between our designer and our dev team we've had a couple of them made for us out of just, you know, just as a surprise. And it's the best thing ever to come down and just see a new emoji with one of your favorite co workers face on it.
It's so badly. It's so much fun. It's so easy to make, too.
I wish that I wish that I had the talent to make it, and I've got a, I've got to follow up with this just quick little debate point because I've heard it pronounced different ways throughout this conversation.
gif or GIF.
I've always said, Now I'm thinking about do I say, precisely I say GIF. But I'm pretty sure it's GIF.
You have to go back to the audience Sorry, I'm just kidding.
Yeah, thank you guys so much for that debate as a tech please, please jump in here we'd love to hear your take
things for me it's not so much about what is better than the other. I think the people so far, you know, pretty been one sided for slack being better. And I'll just kind of take the word on that I've always used Microsoft Teams in my experiences but in regards to the future of work. I mean one thing that I just point that I wanted to bring up is you know Microsoft Teams over 500,000 organizations have implemented it over 90% of the Fortune 100 use it and you also have to keep in mind, why that is right like you guys were already speaking on it, companies don't just buy in, but they're sold the Microsoft technology stack by a lot of the times you know consultants system implementations teams. And so, again, it's not really so much about what is better than the other but I think that Microsoft Teams is going to continue to just be a really strong player in this market and as much as one person might want to use slack you know at the end of the day, you just have to use what your, what your organization gives you and that's that.
Yeah, to kind of go off of that, I would say also. It really depends on who they're going after so for example like slack. It's very like you see a lot of startups, or smaller companies using it. When it comes to enterprises, a lot of huge companies like those fortune 500 that you're talking about, they're using it, because they're able to bundle, and save a lot on when it comes to like, you know, you can get the whole package you can get Microsoft Teams, and you can get Word, Excel, the whole Microsoft suite so then I guess it becomes a pricing and packaging, kind of debate versus. You know what's better slack versus Microsoft Teams.
Exactly. Yeah,
since we're talking about the future of work, I thought I might chime in on this here, good points have been made, although I would point out that the fact that Microsoft packages teams in all of its standard offering does not necessarily mean that all companies that use Office actually use teams. But I don't want to go down that rabbit hole. If we're talking about the future of work and and and what enterprise grade versus not, I mean, IBM is wall to wall on slack now. So, slack is just as enterprise. Ready, as it needs to be to support an incredible customer like that. And, from the perspective of the future of work, I thought I would kind of turn the, the direction a little bit to talk about what work looks like in a perpetually potentially remote environment and how important your virtual headquarters becomes in that, in that scenario right because when you no longer have a headquarters, but everyone is working from which is what a lot of tech companies are moving to, we really start to see the importance of the platforms through which we communicate the tools through which we we engage with each other, and really how those drive cultures. And it's funny because like, you know, we joke about while emojis are like the best thing, but actually emojis are really powerful tool that drive culture, drive engagement and interaction and in a light way. But there's so much more on top of it the fact that, yes, lots of companies use Office, but lots of companies also use a massive amount of other software and services that don't really integrate with teams but slack is built to be the platform for that collaboration and integration. And so we talked about integration earlier integrations earlier, by the way, on that note, you guys should check out the React g channeler, add on, which is or what is
app, which basically enables you to
basically whenever whenever someone reacts with a specific reactor you can channel, a copy of that message to another channel so you can have really cool feeds and things like that. I thought of it as folks were talking but since we are talking about the future of work I guess the question I would ask the room is, what are some of the biggest challenges that you foresee in kind of creating that cohesive team space and creating that, you know, tight collaboration and tight communication and what are some of the problems that you're seeing that you want tackled that the tool sets that you have at your disposal right now maybe aren't necessarily addressing.
Thank you so much for that insight Tatyana well Leica we'd love to hear your opinion, I'm sorry I'm messed up your name here. fazia, please jump in after Malaika and then Peter we'd love to hear your take.
So the question was, what is my opinion on the future of work and how do we keep people connected in what might be a perpetually remote
sort of situation. Yeah.
I mean, yeah, very, very good. Possibly deep question, I think, I think it really is about the ability to foster foster connection for companies that have been used to being remote, I would envision comes to mind I think they've always been remote. It's probably not a big, big deal from for them they probably already figured this out. I know for me personally, but the company that I'm at right now okay for Connect we were all co located, and then because of COVID, everyone is remote so I've, I've as a leader. As a manager of people I've had to really think about how to foster connection in other ways. And so that looks like making time for talking with the team about things that aren't work related. It looks like when we have meetings for instance having check ins to just see how everyone is and how everyone is doing. It looks like using using apps and tools like, there's one called icebreaker that allows people to get into rooms and play games with one another and answer questions that foster deeper connections, and it looks like using tools like slack and Google needs, and all of the, all the tools at our disposal to have to have conversations. I do believe that there will be more and more of a holistic view about work, and a more balanced view about work as we as we emerge from this pandemic because it's really taken a toll on everyone, mentally, and socially, obviously. Anyway, that's my take.
Okay so much more like a fascia. We'd love to hear your take please please jump in. Hey, thank
you for having me up here, fascinating topic, I've been doing product management for over a decade now, I have worked in companies of all sizes so had been very active slack user never thought I would ever switch to teams even if you put a gun to my head. As it turns out, just like that that was saying, you know, depending on your enterprise if they do end up using teams, you are going to be using teams so that's what I've been doing for the past year and a half or so, especially during the pandemic I was surprised how much, how many improvements Microsoft has made to the teams, but definitely I have to agree with Hassan there. It feels very enterprising and the element of fun or, you know, the collegial experience that slack provides is very hard to emulate. And when you are still like I see a lot of communities, volunteer work or outside of work as product people we're passionate people constantly as their extension. We're constantly thinking how to make things butter, and there's so many communities that we all become a part of. And I see slack is where the action is I see very hard for teams to replicate that. That being said, I know Microsoft is making huge strides in terms of solving for the employee experience space so I'm kind of looking forward to what they have to offer in their new Viva solution and I think they launched it just last week, and similarly slacks been doing a lot so I think the pandemic definitely has caused a lot of these enterprise like solutions to be more thinking around just like I said, mental health and wellness employee well being, how do you keep all of that front and center. So that's kind of my take I'll keep it brief. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Peter jump in and then Derek we'd love to hear from you. We know you work at Microsoft and so it'd be great to hear your perspective on your guys's product strategy and things that you have been working on.
Hey, thanks for having me up here I don't really have anything to contribute. But just had a quick question for everyone. How do you guys think or
what do you think about sales forces, the acquisition of slack and you know how you think that'll impact the product and and everything going forward.
Peter I think that's a great question. And yeah I guess I'd love to pose that to the, to the whole room. So I no longer work in sales I'm a product manager now but my first year when I graduated, out of college, I worked in advertising sales sold ads to some pretty big companies like Facebook Reddit Snapchat, etc. And I always thought it was absolutely ridiculous that people that were one and two levels above me and our organization chart would have to do so much stuff manually, that if Salesforce had an effective slack integration with just, just the most simple automation, it could literally save them hours every single week. So, so that's what I think what I really think about about that acquisition is, I would assume there are going to be a lot of ways to automate tedious tasks that that leaders of sales teams, typically have to run into. I'm sure there are a lot of other use cases but that's the one that is just front of mind for me.
That's pretty interesting JJ Can you give an example of of like how how it would save hours for like senior management just having that that slack integration. Just curious.
So, as like a very basic example let's say that I have an account open under my name. Let's say Facebook is my account in Salesforce. So there's an inbound lead coming from Facebook. In our sales organization, it comes to me and that's that's a very simple setup I own. I own the account. So it comes to me, but our group publishers so that the head of our team at certain parts after big after big mark, getting pushes every quarter, she would get hundreds and hundreds of mix between bounce back, emails, people that switched positions so it's a new lead that isn't logged in Salesforce but they work at Facebook, and she would have to manually go through every single one of them and send it out to the proper rep, the proper manager and or the proper outside sales rep. So if that could all just be pretty automated. So let's say there's like a 95% confidence score that you have to reach before automating sending the lead to somebody. But if I get sent in in price, so it'd be very easy to send out 95% of those forwarded messages, automatically, and the 5% that are done incorrectly, like let's be real. I don't want to knock the. I don't want to. I don't want to knock people that are entry level and sales but if I'm an entry level salesman. my time is not worth as much as my boss's boss. So in the case that 5% of the time I get a lead automatically sent to me that's meant for my colleague, I kind of feel like, like that, that is a. How do I wrap this up. You know if it would save my boss's boss hours every week, and potentially cost me. The bottom line, 20 minutes a week, it just seems like a very worthwhile automation to implement
very worthwhile integration and. So, there is already an integration between Salesforce and slack. Notwithstanding the acquisition, which I, you can all understand I won't comment on. But there is already an integration that allows you to send messages to channels and messages between slack and Salesforce. You can you can connect lookup records directly in slack you can do all kinds of stuff like that. So, it is very much a solid use case that our own sales team uses every day.
Thanks so much for that Tatyana Derek we. We'd love to hear you jump in, obviously you have a really unique perspective and Microsoft Teams. And so yeah, please please jump into the conversation. Yeah Hi I'm Derek Johnson I work at Microsoft and I lead a number of AI projects, spread across office as well as teams so I really appreciate the discussion here. I live in Silicon Valley. You know my wife works in a company with G Suite and slack and zoom so it's great to see the perspective. You know something I wanted to mention is just looking at what's happened over the last year, and frankly last couple years with the advance of teams. You know teams has really developed from a brand new product into something pretty incredible pretty fast. And I think the last year has taught all of us how important that human element is so, you know, when you talk about it as an enterprise tool, I can certainly see how you feel that way when I look over at what slack is doing. But I think we're all seeing how important this is. And you'll start to see this week we're rolling out some really great work around making reactions, a lot more humanizing bringing people together and there's gonna be a lot of work that's coming and I'm sure the same at slack as well. Around bringing people more into the discussion, it's one thing you know when we used to have a lot of presentations, where you would be in the room and you would have your slides as maybe visual elements that others can look at. But now that everything's remote often you're forced to choose between Do I look at the presenters video or do I look at the content and these things serve to dehumanize that conversation. So I think you're gonna see a lot of things coming both from Microsoft I'm sure other products in the market as this evolves, but really excited and I appreciate all the thoughts shared here it's great to be able to participate in this. I think from my side I think that is one of like the more critical things because I from my side I there's so much of the human element that's been lost if I look, I was fully in the office up until the pandemic started but then I look back in my company at the people that have joined since then. And there's such a strange. I feel like there's. I hate to say it but an outsider insider mentality of those of us that knew each other in the office still are a lot closer than I think the people that have joined since then, and they're kind of happy to break into the culture and yeah you've got those odd teams channels and things like that where you try and create those human connections, but just so much different being remote and trying to bridge that gap as opposed to if you were fully remote going into it. So I feel like that's, that's one challenge I think we're seeing and i i'd love any opportunity to try and break that down. Really, whether it be team slack whatever I just I feel like I've struggled to kind of see the answer there. Look,
that human element is so critical, I in the past have worked at a company with companies that had a lot of remote teams, and had to tackle some of the challenges of having a headquarters where you have your primary development team your primary sales team your executives all sitting, and then the folks who feel like they're on the fringe in in a lot of ways and there's a big challenge around how to bridge that gap and I actually personally think that this pandemic and the kind of forced transition to remote work in some ways does act as a bit of an equalizer because now we're all using the same methods to interact with each other, which we in the past, remote teams had to use one set of methods and you know, if you were in person, you could just run into people in the hallway or stalk someone outside their conference room or whatever else. And so I also agree it's a really interesting time to be working in the productivity space and in the tooling space to actually figure out how we can, we can foster some of that human element in the tools that we create, and that we use. And so, I think that's a really good call out
so much Tatyana. I'm going to move on to Hassan and then a boy with a bag and then we're actually going to switch the discussion topic to talk a little bit more about the future of work so we can all discuss that as well so Hassan and then a boy with a bag.
Sure yeah I mean, I was gonna say like completely agree with Derek Malacca and Tatiana about. I think the real issues right now are that you know, we're so used to being in the office and, you know, meeting with people in person having natural interactions where you see someone in the elevator in the hallway and you meet people naturally through there right some of the really good friends I made at work was always like, oh I saw them you know working a few desks across for me. And he would go and say hi and you know, introduce myself and that's a lot more difficult now, but but I think it's even more than that is what I find difficult with remote work is not being able to understand the emotions of the person that I'm working with right so you know what like what time of day they're having Are they happy today, are they, you know, going through a rough time today. Those are things that whenever you see someone's face in person you can kind of tell and ask them but it's really hard for us to connect one on one with people in a remote environment, and really be able to understand and so I'd be interested at least for my company to have some sort of integration, some sort of tool where we can even put our emotions and kind of, so that we can create our, we can make sure our emotional health is really, you know, being being taken care of to say, hey Today's a rough day or I had a late start and Dave will share some of those details, and secondly I think it'd be really cool to be able to share what we're doing sort of throughout the day like hey, am I taking a five minute break. Because, you know, in the office we would just go and sit down in the break area and then someone would come by and say, oh hey you know I've seen you around you'd you'd make that connection that way. So like being able to like say like hey I'm at the water cooler right now. And if I'm at the water cooler. I'm open for someone to come in and talk with me right like having those sorts of tools I think would be super super cool for remote teams nowadays.
Thank you so much. Oh boy. A boy with a bag, please, please go for it and then Seth I'll let you go. Amy we'd love to hear your take and then we're going to move on to the next question.
Perfect. Thank you Michael for inviting me on stage and this chance. So my name is actually side like I do like my boy The bag is my artists name, but my day job actually is at a tech startup in Chicago, Illinois, it's like a shipping logistics startup. And that kind of helper supports and as a senior Support Manager, and I haven't personally used Microsoft Teams but I can speak to slack. I think slack is great for my team just because it the interface and the UI just feel very familiar to something that, like the mate team might use outside of work, like iMessage or discord and that really helps bring in more of a human element to our communication. And I think Hassan you mentioned like water cooler topics. There's so many apps that you can integrate with slack one of you recently introduced is called donut. And you can set a topic and just automatically posted a channel Hey, like, post your favorite cartoon or something. And I think that brings some sort of a human element rather than just being like about work talk. And the other thing is, things slack really helps me because we have people on our team from like offshore and stateside. And it really helps to bring like a human element to it where, if you have a question you have to ask me about like a ticket and Salesforce or something interesting like send me a formal email. It's just like a text it feels like a text is slack me and just, you can use the gifts. And I encourage my team to use a lot of gifts and have custom emojis to say I need help right don't. So I just think slacks design itself just brings a very familiar. Yeah, I guess like a familiar design from outside your workspace to employees and it kind of promotes like casualness with like the professionalism as well.
Michael if i if i may chime in with one more thing which I think will help us transition to the next point. And, yeah, please take your silence of the no cage. I think how I would kind of summarize what we've talked about, talked about so far is that the things that make a collaboration tool powerful our fall around several buckets. One of them is fostering company culture and the human element and helping us connect in various ways. The second is integrations with tools that we use outside of that specific tools to other tools that we use to manage our information to get work done and kind of getting that all together in one place, all kind of organized and searchable etc. And then the third is probably being enterprise ready so being able to operate at scale being able to support cases use cases at scale and supporting large companies. And the last which we haven't talked about very much here but I think it's very important to the future of work so hopefully we can talk about it in the next few minutes is external collaboration so.
All right,
we've talked a lot about what makes us effective in working within our companies but what about collaborating externally. What about talking to our customers to our partners to our vendors to the people who help us, you know, you know audit our books or improve our product with feedback or other CEOs who, you know, want to talk with our CEO about things, etc. And, and how we how we approach that and so I'm a little biased. I work at Black so these are all things that I think about every day and I work on slack Connect which is the environment for external collaboration on slack. So, of course, that's something I spent a lot of time thinking about him but I'm curious what the room thinks about that within the context of the future of work.
Can I say something to that.
Absolutely. Please go ahead.
So Tatiana, thank you so much for creating slack Connect. I was actually one of those first few people a few years ago before slack. Connect was launched in production to work with a wonder that my company was working with at that time this is back in 2018. Before slack Connect went live. And we were able to work with their slack admins and, you know, pass through the firewall and set up a channel channels. Yes sure channels. So, it literally kind of became like a FOMO thing that everybody in the company who wanted to get use cases, turned around pretty quickly. It was like that was the enabler that really speed to market had a huge play there. Thanks to slack connect or prior to slack Connect whatever you call it. So thank you.
Thank you so much for that that was really really good input there, we appreciate that. Amy unless you have a take, please jump in. And then, if not, we're happy to move on to another discussion. That's a little more oriented to the future of work. And just so you all know those who are raising their hands. We apologize we're trying to get everybody on stage, and we are going to do a stage reset probably in about 10 to 15 minutes, so we can continue to get some diverse opinions here but, Amy, we'd love to hear your take, or we're going to move on to the future of work.
I was just gonna talk about the future of work so we can move on. Perfect. I really, people have talked about how they miss like human interaction and stuff. And I kind of feel differently because I'm a consultant and I used to work for IBM and now I work for Deloitte and as a consultant. I think I was in the office like when I first joined IBM for maybe 13 weeks for like the training and stuff. But then after that I did all of my work remote, because I just had to be near an airport, if I had to travel. So like, to me, all I've known is working remote so I don't really mind working from home, I think. I honestly think people are more productive. I've noticed since. Everyone's been working from home like I feel like in the office people, when I was there people had a lot of distractions and like we sat near the marketing team and like the sales team and stuff and there was like a basketball hoop and all that stuff and like a pool table and all that stuff so people got more distracted. And I feel like working remote has made like at least my deliverables and my projects and engagement like move a lot quicker. And I feel like the clients were more satisfied because I mean like all we had to do is pay attention to work. So I hope moving forward like companies. Adopt like a hybrid model where you only have to go into the office like twice or three times a week or something like that. I think that would be more beneficial for their employees and for the companies,
a hybrid model is absolutely what I would support here I because I actually had kind of the opposite end where I went from consulting to an FTP role, and I didn't realize until I got into an office and was in the same office every day, and around those people how much I actually benefited from doing that. But there are some days where yeah if I don't have those distractions I'm not in that open office. I'm going to get a lot more done and so I think for me, I could not agree more on the hybrid model being the way to go in the future. I think it would be interesting to see how well, different companies can execute on a hybrid model. I know, at my company we have like a super meeting heavy culture, or at least we had one before COVID now asynchronous means reputation we use teams has really helped a lot. But once a portion of the workforce is back in the office unless it's kind of all pays for the employee base like everybody works from home on Monday people come in on Tuesday like those hybrid meetings or kind of hallway conversations that are happening in the office that aren't. Now on the digital medium because there are some people in the office. I think it'll be interesting to see how that kind of works out I completely agree with you guys there. I think something that's been in the news this week. Definitely related to the future of work has been Spotify his announcement that they're going to be paying individuals San Francisco or New York salaries regardless of where you're remotely located. I'd love to hear your guys's thoughts about whether you think this is going to be a trend with remote work moving forward, or if you think Spotify is going to be an outlier in their pay structure. I honestly believe a musician's first man. Okay, sorry. Continue. No, go ahead. No I I just had to, I had to put that little segue in there. Come on, like come on artists are getting fleet is Amy I would love for you to continue, continue on with that.
I think it'll, I think it'll depend on like
the sector and like the role that you play in a company like I know when I worked for IBM as a consultant in my practice. The starting salary that we got was the salary that like that's the lowest salary would ever get paid so I started in Cambridge, so if I moved to like a lower cost of living area I still would get paid that. And I liked that a lot because it gave people the flexibility and obviously people get accustomed to like a certain salary. So if someone has to move to like a lower cost of living area it shouldn't affect their salary so I really do hope that companies, adopt that and sorry for my dog. So cost of living, so salaries are usually usually adjusted for local cost of living, that I mean that has always been true even if you even if you physically moved to a different office you didn't get to keep your San Francisco salary if you moved to an office in a different area that had a different standard but I think so. So, Spotify is move is interesting, but I don't think that the compensation personally is going to be the thing that makes that makes the biggest difference here. Future Forum has some data on the subject. And they found that 63% of people favor the flexibility of a hybrid remote office model so people favor, you know, being in the office a couple days a week doing some meetings and working remotely for the rest of the time, 20% of people want to remote work remotely full time. And the remainder I guess want to go back to the
office which
isn't isn't isn't as a very large percentage. So I think, I think we're definitely moving towards a more more remote model and the, there's some flexibility for people being able to live wherever they want and, you know, move to an area where they can afford a bigger house and have, you know, a better, better experience for their family. So in a lot of ways, economically, it's actually, actually, whether salaries fluctuate between areas or not it's actually really good for people to be able to have more control over their lives.
I just want to make a quick comment, sorry. No, go ahead. I think something I've been trying to suggest like trying to see like if companies will adopt this is even using like empty buildings in different locations like I'd love to see like if if your remote working. And let's say you have a ton of employees in a certain city or state or country for that matter. I think it'd be interesting for like companies to kind of rent out maybe a space like a we work kind of thing so you can still have that in person in person connection wherever you are, because I have seen a remote like since I do work at a logistics company like we have a lot of remote employees even before the pandemic. And there was a different dynamic I would say because when you are there in person every day, day in, day out, you have those, those moments like at the town halls in person or getting coffee or water whatnot and those ideas you guys get like in the hallway like you mentioned, I think that's kind of missing if you go fully remote. I mean, of course we have Slack, we have Jimmy Webb like all these are like your Microsoft Teams or whatnot but I don't think anything can be placed that in person, you know, that I guess it's that connection and those ideas that come out of that. So I think it'd be interesting the future of work to have like remote, but also maybe a decentralized office where you have like multiple at one Dallas Chicago or wherever, where your employees can go in if they'd like and meet their other colleagues and work in person.
and also to add on top of that, since we went to remote working, and I've. I would say it really depends on the teams that you work with. So, for example, on my team. There are people in India that I work with and there's people on the East Coast that I work with and to be honest I only have one team member, which is my director who works in would be working in the same office in San Mateo, so I think that hybrid approach would be the next thing. Depending on the teams that you work with whether they're, you know overseas, or in a different state or, you know, located in the same office with you. So I've already said that I'm obviously in support of a more of a hybrid model but I will say, to kind of like the ease of of life and more given that flexibility. A. The increased push for remote work and things like that makes it way easier for myself as a married person for my wife and I to manage full time careers without having to necessarily prioritize one over another. I several years ago strongly considered moving our family across the country for a job but obviously we had different conflicts because it would create an issue with her career and so that was a big discussion so I think that is one other benefit in the future work is a this increased remote and increased flexibility, I think, has potential to help relationships as well and so that two people can navigate a career at the same time easier.
I agree to walk Waleed I hope I pronounced your name right
I agree with his point, like my mom for example, she's the global engineering team and her team sits in Switzerland and Australia. And because of the border closing she has been obviously having to work from she lives in Chicago. So she has to like get up at 2am to have meetings to accommodate to their schedule
over there. So I think to that point, I think that the hybrid would be better for people like that that have teams abroad. So that like, If you have to travel, you can just travel or if you like, come back you can just stay home and you don't have to like like before the border close my mom would have to travel back from Sydney or from like Switzerland. And like get back on a Sunday would have to immediately into the office on Monday. So I think the hybrid schedule would be beneficial for people that are like, constantly traveling,
definitely agree with your point there Amy. I think something else would be a really interesting discussion is when we're talking about the future of work, how does tech like AR VR, and other emerging technologies play a role, either in a completely remote model or in a hybrid model. And we are going to be resetting the room just quickly not, you know, removing everybody but just so we can get some more perspectives up on the stage. And if I could add a little bit more to that question even, I'd love to hear how your thoughts have changed on the future of remote work regarding VR AR since.
Hey, real quick, Simon
before you get going. I just have to say, Man, I got, I got a, I got a book published about a year and a half ago and I wrote. Yeah, I think like for students and stuff with people that are you know under the age of 18. Not exactly the kind of person you want. You don't want miners on video calls and moderated rooms and stuff so that's a place where I see this coming into
full stride is kind of allowing people to retain their identities without.