In praise of change: an interview with Slack Head of UK Stuart Templeton

Organisations cannot afford to return to normal - they must learn from the last 12 months if they hope to compete

"Change is hard, but change is good," Henry Rollins famously said. The last year has certainly been tough, but for business communication and collaboration platform Slack, it's also been very good.

"From the 1st of February 2020 to the 25th of March 2020, we added 9,000 net new paid customers," says Slack's Head of UK, Stuart Templeton. "We sometimes talk about daily active usage, but you probably can't get a more real metric than concurrent or simultaneously logged in users - and that went from a record of 10.5 million on the 16th of March to 12.5 million just nine days later.

"It was reasonably material," he adds, with some understatement.

A year later, Slack's paid customers have grown to 156,000 (more than a 40 per cent YoY increase), including 65 firms in the Fortune 100. The company has performed well in the pandemic, and Templeton hopes that remote working will continue.

The figures certainly support that: the Future Forum, a collaboration between Slack and various academics, shows that the vast majority of people are embracing the hybrid model: in Q3'20, 72 per cent said they wanted a mixture of office- and home-based work in the future. That has since risen to 83 per cent: 63 per cent who want a hybrid approach and 20 per cent who never want to return to the office.

For his part, Templeton is "really looking forward" to seeing a full office again, but says the focus must be on doing it right:

"The great part of offices are, of course, those collaboration spaces, meeting rooms - canteens if they have them. The really expensive bit are the floors and floors and rows and rows…of spaces where we are all working independently. This time has proved that we don't need those. We need the collaboration spaces, and we can pay for those and perhaps we can be a little bit more flexible about where we work."

A more human approach

Industries like manufacturing and finance will still favour a physical presence after the pandemic, but Templeton believes that most companies will use a hybrid approach going forward. He's quick to point to the positive sides of the last year.

Remote work has helped to widen the field in the search for new talent. As a consequence of increased flexibility in both where and when we work, a London-based role can now be filled by a new mum in Edinburgh or a graduate in Penzance. Templeton hopes this will help to improve social mobility across the UK, spreading wealth outside the Southeast and bringing new demographics into the tech space.

Transparency has grown, too. The loss of the office water cooler culture means that C-Suite leaders "have really stepped up the amount of information that they're sharing, and the frequency at which they sharing it. We should learn from that and keep that up. It helps people feel engaged to be connected to their organisation, and it helps drive that alignment and coordination over time that organisations struggle with so much."

And on a less corporate note, we've come to know and appreciate our colleagues' human side. Knowing what their children look like, what their pets look like - and realising that at any moment one or both of them could appear on a video call - "is a reminder that teams are made up of humans that have great things in their lives, challenging things in their lives, and I think that's a lesson that we can continue to learn, too."

In acknowledgement of this more human approach to work, Slack has launched a concept it calls ‘Friyay': one Friday a month, everyone stops work early. It serves to recognise a few things:

"That working from home, depending on your extroversion, introversion, persuasion, or perhaps where you work - whether you're in a house share or you're perched on a bed - that it's hard, and therefore that time out is a valuable thing."

The importance of variety

Lack of motivation has been a pain point for many of us through the last year; seeing the same four walls and same people day in and day out is draining. We need to be careful not to bring that lack of variety back with us when we return to the office - or as Templeton puts it, "The same square metre on the same platform at the same time of the day to get on the same carriage to go to the same office.

"I personally am thoroughly looking forward to having the option of spending a proportion of my time in the office; I will be intrigued to see what percentage of my life I consider the right balance for me, I look forward to learning that.

"I think it is energising to have variety in where and when we work. I've personally found being at home all the time not super energising. I'm pleased with how it's gone…but also being at the same place every day for the same hours isn't energising."

To recognise the firms that have performed well and innovated during lockdown, Slack is launching its own Slack Spotlight Awards, recognising customers that have shown new, forward-thinking approaches. In the UK, it's presenting awards to HMRC and Gymshark, for their fast movement and transformation in the middle of a crisis.

Removing barriers between you and your suppliers and customers, as both HMRC and Gymshark have done, will be essential to success in the future.

"Every organisation has a need to align and collaborate more seamlessly or with less friction, both internally and externally… I think aligning internally and externally is now almost expected, and I think it's a lesson that we will continue to learn from. More customer interactions via Zoom and those sorts of things, which I think is much more productive for the customers and much more productive for the suppliers; and the ability to communicate in channels."

The last year has proved that change is indeed hard; but if organisations can learn from this time and take those lessons with them into the future, as Slack appears set to do, they can also prove that - as Rollins said - change is good.