Hello and a very warm welcome to our first
Slack Frontiers Europe, 2021. We recognize many of you are juggling work
and home responsibilities at this moment, and we're so thankful to have you with us today. We put together an exciting, informative
and inspiring show. We have a fantastic variety of European customers
that you'll hear from, product teasers, plus a closing keynote speaker
you won't want to miss. I'm speaking with you today from
my living room in London, and this year we celebrated four years since
the opening of our London office. We now have customers spanning across mainland
and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Russia. This range of customers showcases how the
European market for Slack is diverse and growing. Now, you may be
here for different reasons. Some of you are in the early
stages of your Slack journey, while some of you are mature Slack
customers that are looking for new ways to pivot to this way of working. We wanted to bring you a discussion
around the future of work. So to start, an interview between
our CEO and Greg Williams, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired UK. Next, insights
from our Chief People Officer Nadia Rawlinson on the future of work as it relates to people. And then a discussion from Slack's
VP for EMEA, Johann Butting, talking about how we've seen really customers
embrace this future of work using our platform. You'll also be hearing from some
of our younger fans today. I can't wait to hear what they
have to say about the future. So as we speak about the future of work, we really
believe this is a moment of possibility. We think there's a better way to work, where we
feel more connected, collaborative, and flexible. We've kept our cultures alive without
even being in an office. I personally have loved our Slack dad jokes
channel and the cooking channel, which have provided me with much
needed daily doses of humor and helped me improve my baking skills at
the same time during three UK lockdowns. So that can be a powerful way to
embrace this type of future. One that centralizes communication for your
organization and provides freedom to your people. I'm also proud to tell you today about
our Slack for Good sponsorship. We're making a generous donation to UNICEF India
to help battle the second deadly wave of the pandemic. So, let's get started. You'll now hear from Stewart and Greg
as they discuss the future of work. But just before we do check out
part one of their conversation, let's see what some of tomorrow's
Slack employees have to say. [Naya] The town will make, will be robots.
[James] Holographic computers, flying cars. [Oliver] Better technology.
[Brandon] Good. I think it'll be good. [Aubree] I don't know. [Lilly] If you're at work,
and you're home doing work, it's another way for doing homework. Stewart, great to have you with us here today, and
really excited to have an opportunity to have a conversation on what the future of work looks
like. So let's get into it. So first question. Clearly, the past year has been
incredibly challenging, both for individuals and organizations. And I'm
really interested to get your thoughts. What do you think we've learned from this
great remote work experiment that we've all been going through? Well, the first and most important thing I
think we learned is that it's possible, and I would definitely put myself in the category
of people who, in February 2020, would have thought, like, we couldn't
all just start working from home and maintain anything like the
same level of productivity. And part of that is, you know, just imagining
some team working on some project. But it's obviously way more than that. At the time that we decided
to shut down our offices, there were something like five or six
hundred onsite interviews scheduled. You know, maybe some of those were weeks
or even a couple of months away. But the whole recruiting team had to
change how they were working and the whole recruiting process had to change. And
the same thing is true for new hire onboarding. We used to fly everyone to San Francisco
for the first week, and obviously a lot of that was built around in-person
meetings and contact. So it's more than just, you know, a group of marketers launching a website
and coordinating their work. It's kind of like every aspect. And obviously, a huge amount of business travel: salespeople
going to meet customers. I was on the road a lot, and all of that
kind of ground to a halt, too. So the the lesson to take away is I think
if we thought that was impossible and then when we were forced to do it,
it turned out to be possible, what else is possible that we didn't
think would be? Yeah, you're absolutely right.
I think it has changed. You know, one CEO said to me that they
thought that the pandemic has reset the art of what's possible. I think that's
a really great way to frame it. And in this hybrid model that you're describing, it clearly offers enormous advantages in many
ways, both for employers and the employees. But there's going to be challenges, and obviously a lot of employers are going to
be worried about productivity. And given that some people will be in the
office at different times from others, and some people are going to work remotely full
time, and others will want to be back into the office, how do you think about how businesses and organizations can best
balance this flexibility? That, I think most organizations are
going to move towards with, but they're also going to need to couple that with
the productivity that's needed. [Stewart] One way to think about this, instead of a slider for
the number of days, is the degree to which the organization is digital first. And this is very convenient for us as a company
that sells software to help people work together and probably convenient also, or maybe even
self-serving for both us and the people in the audience for this conversation who are kind
of leading the charge inside their companies. But, it is really true. And when I say digital
first, I have a really specific meaning in mind. This phrase could have been around
for a very long time, but the first person I ever heard use it
was Tobi Lütke, the CEO of Shopify. And this was back in April or May of last year
when we were talking about what we will eventually return to. He was the first person I
heard say if there's seven people in a meeting and one of them is remote, we're still going
to get on the Zoom call separately and everyone's going to have their own
tile in the meeting, which, you know, sounds like it's going to be a little bit
inconvenient. And it might be to some extent. It also sounds, as someone who is on the road a
lot and calling into meetings, like a godsend, because it's so frustrating to
be the only person who's CEO, who has two seconds of lag in the conversation
and can't hear everyone around the room because the microphones aren't
well placed and all that. But if you think about it that way, like
taking the digital first approach, then every bit of in-person interaction
is like a bonus. You know, it's like some additional tool, but it does require more discipline,
and inconvenience might be the wrong word, but effort.
You know, it does take more effort. At the same time, you talk to, you know, any
anyone, certainly any manager, any leader. And if you ask them, OK, look, of all the
meetings that you're having across the company right now with the right kind of
training, the right kind of techniques, the right kind of like, structure and process.
You know, for example, you know, people like moving to the Amazon-style, six-page
memo pre-read instead of slide presentations, or there's always someone responsible for
ensuring that the meeting has a clear agenda and decisions to be made. Or, you know, all these
different processes. If you ask people, could your company improve the overall efficacy
and productivity of its medians by 20 percent, let's say. Almost everyone would say yes. And then, well, if most people are spending
most of their day in meetings, why are you doing that? You know,
because it is - it's hard. It's, you know, if there really was a 20
percent improvement to be made there, and you have 10,000 employees and
therefore have, you know, like a billion dollars plus in payroll costs,
and people are spending, let's say, half of their time on really basic acts
of communication and coordination. So not, like, the interesting creative strategic
brainstorm kind of conversation, but more like the update, the status report, the
review that - you know, all of that stuff. It's not that those things are unimportant. You know, I think they're actually critically
important because that's how you stay aligned and you're able to accomplish things
with a large group of people, and especially really complex projects that
take a long time and involve, like, hundreds or even thousands of people. But it
is a tremendous amount of effort. And, you know, so why why don't we do that?
Why don't we put that effort in? And when you start to move digital first, I think it's an opportunity to reexamine
the ways that you're working and see which ones serve you and which ones don't and kind of what things you'd like
to change in the future. Because that requirement of more discipline, the
six people who are in the office all getting on the Zoom separately, the more careful use of
documentation to support asynchronous-style meetings or to support people
in multiple time zones. You know, all of that effort, I think,
has a has a huge payoff. And maybe we can piggyback our way in this world
where we have to change all these things to create some of those changes, which we hope
that we would have made all along. We'll come back later for part
two of the conversation. Next, we're going to hear from our Chief People
Officer, Nadia Rawlinson, on the people & culture side of things. But first,
another word or two from our little sponsors. Work and cook. Work so then we can have money. I don't know what you do, so no. He works for marketing operation.
He almost never gets the breaks. [Naya] You tell people if their art is good or bad
[James] Animation and cool, and cool, um, stuff.
[Lucas] Work [Lilly] She makes money.
[Oliver] You never really explained it to me. Emails? Eat snacks, have lunch, go potty... yeah. Hello everyone and welcome. I'm coming to you
from my home in Chicago, Illinois, in the US, and I'm excited to share with you today what
we've learned at Slack in navigating work during these unprecedented times. We're embracing the future of work because we've seen how it can improve
connections between people, how we can be more productive, and evolve
our culture in important ways. I'll also share some tips for leaders
on how to navigate this new normal. You know, I can speak from personal experience
because I joined Slack in the middle of the pandemic back in September. I've never even met my peers or exec team in
person, including Stewart Butterfield, our CEO. Prior to the pandemic, we were surprised to learn
that only three percent of Slack was remote. So this was a big change for us, but it was an
opportunity for us to lead in the space. As professionals around the world, we experienced the collapse of the personal and our working lives into one.
Social systems were tested, health care systems were stressed to the max. We had to figure out how to
homeschool our children and we also had to take care of loved ones. But during this time, we gained
a new level of flexibility, inclusion became a centerpiece
of how we worked together, and connection became that much more important. We discovered, yeah, this feels different,
but it's possible. We can be productive, we can launch new products, hire and
onboard people. You know, at Slack, 30 percent of our entire workforce to date
has been hired during the pandemic. So we can be effective, and we also
can find balance in our lives. Many of these insights led us to
establish the Future Forum, a think tank Slack sponsors to create original
research on the topics of the future of work. For instance, in the US, underrepresented
groups which are made up of blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, find a higher sense
of belonging than their peers, which was an unexpected result of the pandemic.
We wondered why could that be? It turns out people can just bring
their whole selves to work. There's less code-switching, and by that, I mean
the way that we change the way we speak, dress and act in order to make other people
feel comfortable and to fit into a group. And quite frankly, it can be exhausting. Underrepresented minorities really do feel a sense of belonging in this distributed
work environment. 64 percent of us feel a greater boost in
the ability to even manage stress and a 25 percent greater improvement
in work-life balance. We now have the opportunity to take what
we've learned during this time and leverage technology to be
the great democratizer. Employees want flexibility
because they have lives. One of the other things that we learned at the Future Forum is that 83 percent of
professionals don't even want to go back to the office full time. They prefer flexible
hybrid working environments. Now, here is the opportunity for leaders. First, we need to set expectations for hybrid
work: shift to a digital first approach, not in an office or in-person approach. Next, we need to get creative about
new ways to measure progress. Hours in the office and face time
just won't cut it anymore. We need to redefine and evolve our cultures
by listening to our people and adapting to what they need. No one nails it on the first try, but it's important to try at all. Slack as a platform
can help improve the connection between people and your culture. I've found at Slack that we have
a very unique culture that's intentional, people-centric, and highly collaborative. And for me, it's shown up in
a couple of different ways. For instance, we have what we call 'Friyays': a
once-a-month Friday-off holiday in order for our people to prevent burnout. This allows for people to spend time
on things other than work, connecting with friends and family
or just doing what they love. And what's more important about this Friyay is
that all of us as leaders also take the Friyays. It's important to model this
behavior from the top. And on Mondays I come back and hop into some
of our communities and connections and talk about those activities that I did on Friday to make sure we're
reinforcing those norms. We also have culture channels that create
communities around a certain topic or interest, such as #doodles or #cooking, and I've really
gotten into those over the pandemic. Doodles are for people who have dogs that are mixed with
poodles. I have Miles, he's my favorite. Don't tell Herbie that. And we post pictures
of them throughout the week around some of the things that dogs do. There's
also in the cooking channel, I'm learning to become a master chef
at making pasta from scratch. And so I have a community of people
to help me along on my journey. And it's really great to be able to have
those moments when we can step away but in - within Slack and learn from other
people that are outside of my day-to-day team about things that are of personal interest to me. All of these connections, though, are supported by
some of the features that our platform offers, these are capabilities that enable us to exist in
some of those cultural connection channels. For instance, we take Friyays, you can update
your status by saying Nadia Rawlinson, my name, and a status update saying 'Friyay'
with a great emoticon, so people know that I'm taking
advantage of the holiday. We also have automated time zones and so
people understand your working hours and when it's best to connect with you. But finally, if you're on the
other end of the spectrum and you just want to put your head
down and get stuff done, there's the option to pause all notifications
altogether so you really can focus on getting work done. I promised when we first
met that I'll give a few tips for leaders as you navigate this next year. First: be curious. Be a student of your own
culture. Learn how it works and how it's evolving. When I first came to Slack, I was
really surprised at how open and candid our conversations were. I started poking around our culture channels and saw one of our behavioral tenets
is to embrace the elephant. And by that I mean go after
and say the hard thing. It's allowed us to have very direct and clear
communication, which has really made us better. Second: be intentional. Don't assume things will
evolve as they should make the implicit explicit and always overcommunicate. And lastly: be
authentic. Admit that all of this is hard, ask the hard questions of yourself and others,
but also engage on personal topics. People want to see that you're human to. So here's what I want all of us to remember,
this is our first global pandemic, it's impacting our lives in personal
and professional ways. As leaders give yourselves permission to try
things. Explore something new as we move forward. One thing's for sure, the vision is clear, this is our opportunity to redefine the future of
work and make a difference in organizations for decades to come.
[Nini] Thank you, Nadia, for reminding us that this new work environment
can give us the opportunity to bring our whole selves to work. I love that. And as you
pointed out, Slack has a pretty amazing culture. The platform is both our culture and our business, and I have definitely felt that this past year. So next up is Johann Butting,
Slack's VP for EMEA, to talk to us about how we see customers
using Slack to embrace the future of work and run their businesses. Thank you, Nini. Welcome, everybody,
to our Frontiers conference. We are so excited to have you all with us. I'm seeing participants from London, from Moscow,
from Dubai, from Oslo, even from Cape Town. So, again, we are thrilled to have you here. As you can see, I am speaking
from my home office today, and that is really highlighting a question
that is on everybody's mind right now. How will we work when the lockdown is over? What have we learned over the
last one and a half years? And how can we best apply that
to how we work in future? To help us think about that question, I'm here to
talk about a few specific things with you today. First, how do we see our customers and our
users think about the future of work? Second, then, how do we see them act? I.e. , how do we see our customers use Slack
in the current environment? And finally, some steps that we think everybody
can take today in their own business to best embrace the future of work.
So let's start by talking about a few trends that we see how work is changing. According to polls conducted by our own research
institution, which we call Future Forum, 83 percent of knowledge workers do not want to go
back to five days a week in a physical office. The preference is strongest in millennials, who are by now constituting half of
the world's global workforce. They really want a hybrid or
even a fully remote model. And from that it's clear:
the future of work is hybrid. During this past tumultuous year, Slack's served
our customers by helping them stay aligned, productive, and connected. And observing our
customers over that period provided us with some very valuable insights. Many of them started
using Slack for the first time. We saw a significant jump in paid customers,
growing by 94 percent in the UK, 100 percent in Germany and even 138 percent in
France, albeit from a slightly lower base. And Slack's own shift to remote work within a
mere 72 hours was also relatively seamless. We do think this was because we relied on
our own platform rather than email. So let's talk about email a little bit. I think it is becoming ever more clear
that Slack and tools like it have a massive leg up over email
when it comes to productivity. According to a research study
by Wakefield Research, Slack users worldwide estimate they
save an average of 90 minutes a day using Slack instead of email. That's seven
and a half hours, almost a whole working day. And it's not just about saving time, 96 per cent of users believe they can forge better
connections via Slack than via email. And nearly half of IT decision makers predict
that another form of digital communication will completely replace email within
the next three years. This includes an impressive 60 percent of
it decision makers in France and in the UK, 40 percent of users would rather
go without email than without Slack. Of course, we did not only hear feedback about
email, we also heard a lot about meetings. I won't go into that in the same amount of detail. But there is one statistic I would like to share. Slack users estimate that, on average, 40 percent of phone or video meetings could have
been replaced with a massive Slack thread. So they also see some massive efficiency
gains in that area. Let's talk a little bit about how we have seen
Slack help companies stay effective throughout the pandemic. Let me start with acknowledging
that it was not easy for any of us to find our way
through the past year. That personally must admit that I was very skeptical when it came
to work from home. Especially, I could simply not imagine that it would be
possible to run our business here in Europe without a significant amount of
in-person customer meetings. I was very nervous when the entire
team had to go remote. No change of the scale and speed comes without
its challenges, but ultimately, I have to admit things have worked way better
over this past year than I thought. And based on that experience, I see so much
opportunity to change the way we work. As the work begins to open back up, we can become
so much more productive, more connected, more flexible, more inclusive. And I'm convinced
that taking advantage of these opportunities will be a key driver of success going forward, the companies will embrace these opportunities
in a smart and fast way. They will be the most successful ones. But that being said, let's take a look at how
Slack can help transform the way we work. Slack really consists of two parts. First, it is a messaging platform for businesses which lets you organize
conversations into channels. And in addition, it is also an integration
layer that allows you to integrate all the software that you work with into Slack. It is really the combination of those two parts:
the messaging system and the integration layer both organized into channels that makes
Slack so powerful and popular among employees. People can work together more effectively, connect all their software tools
and services and find the information they need to do their
best work, all within a secure, highly scalable environment that fits you
regardless of whether you have five employees or 500,000. It has never been more important than
now to bring everyone together in one place, and that is why we like to think of
Slack as your digital headquarter. And if there's one term I want you
to take away from this session, then it's that one: digital headquarter. Now, let me tell you about three big benefits
that our customers regularly talk about. First, Slack's unique platform,
centralizes information. Once all communication gets moved into channels,
everyone knows where to go to ask questions, give updates, and get caught up. It brings the right people information
and through the integration there, the right tools into one place moving
work forward with a common purpose. This has a transformative effect
on your daily information. Second, Slack fosters asynchronous communication. Communication does not always
need to happen in real time. Slack allows people to work and communicate
when it's best for them, giving users the ability to focus on meaningful
work and keep their calendars clear. And third, Slack fosters more collaboration. Collaborative work is no longer
defined by one way or one time of doing things. You may not need
scheduled meetings to move your work forward. And perhaps it's not even the best way. And there's more than one way to get across what
you want to say through messages, videos, audio, etc. With Slack, collaboration is always
happening whenever, wherever, however it is best for you. In fact, our customers have told us repeatedly how they
have seen these benefits impact their business over the past year. So the pandemic's really highlighted how biased
businesses tend to be against people who have commitments outside of work. It's really
forced us to reconsider what types of interactions need to happen in real
time versus versus not, right? So we now record all critical meetings so people
can watch them at a time that's convenient for them. We still run live Q&As, but we also
have subject-specific and more general 'ask anything' Slack channels that people
can subscribe to and engage with us and each other at a time that's more convenient
to them. Which is which is wonderful, right? So, we've learned a lot about ways to support our
colleagues from a well-being perspective as well over the past year, whether it be through
running sort of online exercise classes that we can do together or, or cuter little, little
things to do with sort of Chatbots. So when we recognize people or when we notice
people using certain keywords in conversations, keywords that may suggest that they're they're
feeling stressed or under pressure, the chat will automatically direct them to some
of our wellbeing resources, which is, which is, I just think a really nice, really nice touch. My thoughts on the future of office-based working? I really I really struggle to imagine a future where companies can really justify
insisting that all employees return to the office five days a week. So this particularly
applies to global companies like ours with distributing teams where we've shown just how more
effective certain types of working can be when conducted remotely or virtually. And I see I see platforms like
Slack really playing a huge role in enabling this sort of mindset shift
and behavior change over the coming years. So Slack plays a very important role when it
comes to successful merging businesses, which is something that we at JET know rather
a lot about, given how active we are with M&A. So when we bring a new team into our organization, consolidating our Slack workspace
is an absolute top priority. So Slack Connect helps us to bridge
the gap between our organizations. But nothing says 'one team' like
being on the same workspace. So we put a lot of energy towards ensuring
that our Slack set-up mirrors the organizational structure and the flexibility that Slack offers means
that we can be quite deliberate with the way that we design the structure
of our channels so as to encourage certain types of conversations or
or collaboration between certain individuals. So, I mean, I think I'd probably go so far
as to say that Slack is actually a critical success factor when it comes
to bringing new companies together. Now, let us take a look at a few new tools that we
have added to our platform recently to enable you to harness these trends. And let's
start off with Slack Connect, which really changed my working life. I already mentioned my job used to revolve around
a lot of travel to meet customers face to face. But I've actually been able to connect with
even more senior leaders and CIOs over the last 12 months than before the
pandemic. That is due to Slack Connect. So what is Slack Connect? Slack Connect allows
you to work with external organizations with the same speed and security you've come
to expect from Slack within your own company, extending the benefits of challenge to any
organization you need to work with. Slack Connect continues to transform the
way organizations work together. Moreover, and to provide an even faster, more lightweight way to kick off
conversations than email, we have recently launched
Slack Connect Direct Message, a way to securely exchange direct messages with
anyone at any organization that you work with. Simply share your private invite link with
a trusted partner, a customer, a vendor. Invite them to message with you
on Slack and thereby speed up the work that often starts over
back and forth emails. I can tell you it has recently changed how
I work with our customers. For example, we recently had a customer in the Netherlands
where their Head of Global Customer Success, was a huge Slack fan, but
also somewhat frustrated because she felt that we were not
hearing her product feedback. We did regular quarterly meetings with her. She
was not sure if she was getting through. Leveraging Slack Connect, I was able
to start messaging with her, connecting our two Slack instances.
Whenever she has an idea, she is now messaging me directly, and I can then
draw our product team into the discussion or our local team in the Netherlands. She can draw additional team members on
her side into the discussion, etc. The outcome has been a much, much
closer customer relationship and indeed some very valuable ideas, how we can
make it even better for customer service. There are two more things I'd like to talk about, and both of them are additional collaboration
tools that we are building within Slack. For that, let us come back to the
theme of asynchronous work. The trends that we discussed earlier
all point to a future that strikes the right balance between synchronous
and asynchronous work. In future, we will be more deliberate in
deciding what work needs to be done at the same time: synchronous, and what can be
done at different times: asynchronous. In order to empower workers to decide
for themselves what to work a certain task requires, we are
working on asynchronous video. We want to replace the countless hours of often
unnecessary and inefficient synchronous meetings, so we are coming up with new ways
to use video to communicate. We are working on a feature that allows
you to record a video snippet, then post in channel for your team
to view at a time that suits them, making it more inclusive for those
in different time zones and those with different communication styles. At the same time, we are also implementing new
ways to facilitate synchronous collaboration by making it more casual, similar to what you'd
expect in an office environment. Because channels are where work
is already happening, there's a huge opportunity to make them the place where more casual collaboration
is happening too. One example of that is lightweight audio. We have been prototyping a lightweight audio
feature, which is being released soon, which enables always-available,
audio-only interaction that fosters the kind of spontaneous collaboration we are
missing from not being in the office together. Simply press a button and thereby open an audio connection where everybody
in that channel can join and talk to each other if they want to. And
if they don't want to, they don't have to. Essentially, it's an audio wall. Another addition to Slack that has long been
requested by many customers is our Workflow Builder. How does that work? Workflow Builder is a visual tool that lets anyone automate
routine tasks right in Slack, connecting all your favorite apps. Remember that integration layer - all the apps
you have integrated and putting them together with
no coding required. Yes, that means you don't need to
be a developer to use this. You can do things like get new team members up
to speed with welcome messages. For example, you set up a workflow so that whenever
people join a channel, they are automatically sent resources they need
to get caught up without wasting time asking others for information. Or, you can create a daily Standup routine in China instead
of requiring attendants to of meeting. Every day at a given time, you can send a message
to be posted in a team channel with a reminder and instructions for
posting a daily status update. That is a useful way to keep teams aligned
and communicate status and progress. Or finally, you can keep up to date, respond
to, and even create incidents in real time. For example, if you have an application
like PagerDuty installed, you can not only get real-time
updates around incidents, you can also create an incident from within Slack. As you can see, a lot of Slack's core product
roadmap is focused on encouraging a more flexible, inclusive and connected way of working. Slack is making digital-first solutions
work for everyone in every situation. We are talking about challenging rigid barriers
that no longer apply to modern day work with tools and capabilities in Slack that
allow people to create and consume and act upon critical information. Finally, let us take a look at some very simple and practical steps that each of you can
take to embrace the future of work. All over the world, leaders are
facing this new future of work. It varies a little bit depending on what
country you are in, some other circumstances. But it's clear that all of us are looking ahead
to a working world that is predominantly hybrid. With this in mind, I'd like to share some basic
tips for leaders making the transition to a hybrid work on Slack. First, set clear expectations about how to use
Slack for each function in your business. Second, make use of the training resources
that are available online and through our customer success teams. And third, connect Slack to all your other
critical tools. Again, we have 2,400 applications in our app directory,
including Google Calendar, Microsoft OneDrive, and Zoom, and many, many others. Slack is the two
percent of your software budget that makes the other 98 percent more effective. Don't lose
out on that benefit. Integrate those applications. With that, let me wrap up for today. At Slack, we
consider ourselves very lucky to work with companies of all sizes across all industries, especially now, as we collectively
begin to plot a new future, leaving the old normal behind
for a better way of working. Especially thankful for all our EMEA customers who
have been such strong supporters of Slack. again, thank you for your commitment. We hope to have the opportunity to speak with
you and others who want to learn more about the topics we will be covering at Slack Frontiers.
The future starts today. When we started the business, which
was just over five years ago, we knew that we wanted to have a company
where culture came first. A company there was going to be operating with
kind of hyper high bandwidth communication between team members. And I think, you know, we got tired of the old-fashioned solutions like
email that we just not discursive enough and far too, kind of, almost, kind of pre-digital in their conception. So for us, Slack was an absolutely natural thing
we wanted to build at the core of our business. For our senior leadership team and for me as CEO,
I think what Slack does is two or three things. The first thing it does is actually lets
see what's happening in the company. That's always been important. But I think as
we've globalized, and through the pandemic as we've had kind of almost total remote working,
Slack has provided us with this kind of continuous qualitative pulse check on how people
are feeling and what they're doing. It also lets us kind of drive our thought
leadership through the business. And a lot of the senior management team use Slack
to make sure that not only the direct teams, but actually, you know, different slices through
the company are thinking about challenges, tech challenges, customer opportunities, new
products and services really in the same way. And they're able to get instant kind of feedback
and coalesce the team behind those. This year, Slack's really sort of facilitated
that growth, because, you know, we've had this challenge of: how do you
on board 700 new team members, double the size of your company, at a period when
the vast majority of them can't even come in the office for an interview for
onboarding and for training? And really, what Slack has done is enable new
starts to almost immediately get inside cultural and operational mainstream of the company. Slack's really helped Octopus be
incredibly agile and efficient. I mean, we operate with between 50 percent and
75 percent fewer team members than our rivals for the same scale. And so we're a really efficient
business. And agility is everything, you know. We're trying to drive the global
clean energy revolution, and to do that, we've got to keep
on innovating at lightspeed, and we've got to bring customers with us. And I just wanted to use one example, because my favorite channel in the whole
of our Slack is one called #comms. And the #comms channel is where the people who are
talking to customers, our hundreds of front-line customer operations people, are able to drop any
observation that they've experienced into Slack to enable the comms team, the marketing and other people to very quickly spot things
that we could communicate better with customers, improve that communication, and
then give the feedback back to the operations people that it's happened. And I think that, as one example, is taking processes, which in many companies take
months and involve deep-dive discovery process and loads of Post-it notes, and then turn them into
something that we can just do in real time. Now to me, that's a great example of a company
that is utilizing the power of, in this case, of Slack to be hyper agile. And we
do that across the business. During the pandemic, many companies
kind of had to pivot. I think we were fortunate in that we were
already a very digital company with a lot of, kind of, cloud-based working. So the shift to moving from home for us
was really a case of saying to the team, "Remember to take your power supplies home for
your laptops, and we'll see when this is over." But I think the really deep things that have
changed were not the operational ones like that. It's been how do we keep a company together? How
do we keep team members connected and motivated? How do we help them through the difficulty
and the loneliness and isolation, whilst at the same time continuing to drive,
you know, our hyper-scaling mission? And I think Slack has been absolutely pivotal
there. What it's done is enabled team members across the world to continue to share ideas, thoughts and approaches to delivering
our mission in the Octopus way. And for me as a CEO and for our
team as leaders, you know, everything from the very large
general channels on Slack to the ability that any member of the team can
add @Greg to a message and loop me into a conversation, has really helped us,
kind of, maintain the very flat, very informal approach has
been core to our success. Amazingly, I think in the last year, by the way,
our 1,400 people have sent 28 million messages. And I think that kind of tells you the extent to which we've got this hyper-connected
community now across many countries, time zones, functions, and operations. The most important bit about
Slack is the custom emojis. The custom emojis are what have turned our company
Slack into our very special place. We've got hundreds, thousands of them. They crop up, whether it be an animated
picture of me or, you know, a dog that is celebrating its meal, or whatever
it be. The team have created dancing octopuses. We've got octopuses playing trumpets. And when people post on them on Slack, the custom
emojis kind of carry the genuine emotions of joy and sadness, of interest and excitement, that I think other ways of communicating
digitally just don't do. [James] I want to be an NHL hockey player [Aubree] be a ballerina and singer [Brandon] A construction worker [Lilly] A police officer because
I like very bad guys [Gavin] I want to be a police officer
when Im a big, big adult, like 30 or 25. [Ella] Archaeologist Help other people get food in other countires. I hope you like this video. FREE NOW decided to go 100 percent remote
for several reasons. First of all, I think very quickly we learned
it's actually working. And I'm saying this in a very humble
and safe, reflective way. I as a manager, I as a leader, I wasn't
believing in 100 percent remote. Obviously, the pandemic forced us to trial it,
and it worked. So, I was proven wrong. Therefore, we are now in a place where we
can actually go 100 percent remote. Now, some of our colleagues are coming
from all over the world. I said 76 nations and nationalities are working
at FREE NOW, and they have a very, very strong urge to go back to
their family and friends and look after their parents in this pandemic. So one way of us enabling this and keeping these
colleagues would be to allow remote work. Otherwise, you know, they couldn't go. And then thirdly, as a brand, we
want to create our employer brand and we want to attract amazing future talent. And this is also going to be possible in the
future by people not having to relocate into the north of Germany or into Barcelona,
but actually working from home, keeping their sense of belonging,
not maybe within the business, but with their friends and family, but working
for our amazing business, just remotely. So we use Slack in different ways, and I can give probably a thousand tips on
how to use Slack during remote work. I think one thing that we really did consciously
is we restructured our Slack channels, because we needed to align and there
was no communication across a desk and you couldn't just shout across
the office for alignment. So we created Slack channels
by territory, by geography, and we created Slack channels
by content, like by topic, so that the communication was going
a lot easier than that. Secondly, we started a lot more asynchronous
work, and Slack is helping on that as well. So does the G Suite and, you know, other sharing
documents. But Slack is specifically good if you start having asynchronous discussion
and you kind of chat away and you come to a conclusion. So, decision making processes. And we use Slack now that everybody was working
100 percent digitally anyway to do some automation. So using more Slack boards,
integration with Jira, and these kind of things. So asynchronous work at FREE NOW, maybe I'll
just try and split it into two buckets. There's one thing where, you know, you need to
have a discussion. It's more like a chat, and you come to a conclusion. You can decide,
or you just keep each other updated. Now, we use tools like Slack to do that a lot. The benefit of asynchronous work is, I,
for example, in times of lockdown, have to look after my kids in the afternoon. So I will be able to still participate in that
discussion, because I can do it at my own time. I can do it in the evening. And that's the big,
big benefit of this way of asynchronous work. Now, if we have bigger presentations
or analysis or projects to run, then we work in maybe you could
call it the Amazon style. We build memos, we write proper documentation,
and then we cascade that as a pre-read. Everybody can read it in their own time, and then we only meet digitally to discuss
questions and then come to a conclusion in that meeting. So really, you
can probably say by being more asynchronous, we've become a little bit more
efficient and faster. I love hearing directly from our customers about
how Slack is changing the way they work. Now let's get to the final segment of our
conversation between Stewart and Greg. Did you make any organizational changes in order
to ensure agility or to build resilience, anything you you could share maybe
with other organizations? I think there wasn't at my level, there
wasn't like a top-down decision. And then, you know, different divisions
of the company reorganized. There was a lot of bottoms-up
team-level experimentation and kind of adoption of new approaches. And again,
that can be because you're not in the office at the same time as people, you
need some means of supplementing that kind of the ambient information that
people need in order to really have a shared idea of what's happening and that in the military, they sometimes
call it situational awareness, having that is really necessary and so people
would find other ways. And it also forced a lot of experimentation and ultimately innovation
on the product side of Slack as well, because I think there's two areas which we thought
were especially interesting and valuable. And one was trying to recreate some of the serendipity and spontaneity of in-person conversations
through a feature called Huddles. I think that's what we're going to call it publicly.
It's testing with a bunch of customers right now. But, unlike a call, which starts and stops,
and I call you and then your phone rings and you have to answer it right then, it's an always-on audio channel.
And Slack already has the advantage of, people have
created all these channels, and they obviously are intended to mirror
the priorities and structure of the organization itself. There's a - you can have
a channel for every customer, every project, every business unit, office location. And you can just enter the Huddle by yourself and
have your speakers on and be working away, and if someone else joins and they say something,
you'll just hear them. You know, like you would overhear someone at your desk.
And it exists, again, whether you leave or enter. So it's not intended for, you know,
huge groups and, you know, a thousand people or something like that. It's really intended for the people
that you work with most closely. You know, five people, eight people
really at the team level, but teams that are working closely
with each other all day, having this ability to have the conversation
right now turns out to be super valuable, because often the alternative is, "Let's
find a time when we can all meet." And that can't happen until next Thursday
and it's a half hour slot. So rather than being a two minute conversation
right now and the, kind of, the work is unlocked and you can keep going this afternoon,
it becomes, "OK, now we're going to put this
thing on hold and defer the decisions until we can all get together, and because we schedule half an hour, we're going
to use the whole half hour." The other one is doesn't have any kind of public name. We've talked about 'Stories' because one of the
the instruments is like short videos, like Instagram stories or Snapchat stories. But the idea is to create a container
for an asynchronous meeting. Again, this is not the marketing version
of it, but a meeting object. And you can attach the agenda. You can attach
like the presentation or planning materials, supplemental, like, references, technical
documentation, or proposals. And rather than say, "OK, it's 11:30
now on Tuesday, and so everyone stop what you're doing, regardless of how in in the
moment, how in-flow you are. we're going to have this meeting right now," you have the opportunity to spread
it out over, let's say, 17 hours. And there's many advantages for that. The biggest one is it gives people some
flexibility. In any process that today must be synchronous - in other words, people have to do it
at the same time - that you can make asynchronous, even if it doesn't reduce the total
number of hours worked, is still enormously valuable to people. Some
people like to work early in the morning. Some people would rather work in the evening. Some people want to be able to get some exercise
in the middle of the afternoon. And if you're like in lock step,
you know, from 9:00 to 5:00 with every half hour being a new video call that
you're doing, there's a little bit of tyranny might sound overblown. But I think, you know, it is a hangover of the industrial
revolution where we made the transition from people being
paid from what they produced. So if you're a baker, it's like how many loaves
of bread can you bake and sell, to their time. And when you start paying people for their time,
just for logistical reasons, you have to have them all start
and stop at the same time. And you have to have a whistle that blows on the
factory floor and everyone from 10:10-10:20 can go have their tea
or something like that. And that, really, it takes away a lot of
autonomy and, I think, probably a lot of peoples' ability to contribute. Last thing I would say is, of course, it
helps people with multiple time zones. It also helps people who like to take a little bit more time to formulate their
thoughts before giving feedback. So rather than we have 30 minutes in this meeting,
20 minutes of this is me giving you a presentation and now you have 10 minutes to both
think through, you have to kind of process it, synthesize your feedback, and communicate it. And if you don't do it then, you've
lost your chance now. And I think that's a that's definitely
something we should overcome. So on the product front, there was
a major milestone with Slack Connect. What's the uptake been like? It's been pretty incredible. So there's, I'm not
sure what the absolute latest numbers are, but I think 74,000 different organizations that
are using it. That's up more than 100 percent over the year. But the number
of connections between them, because it's not always just one
company to one other company; it could be one company to many other. The rate of those what we call connected endpoints
was 245 percent year-on-year. So really exceptional growth,
and what people are finding is it's, it's so much easier to support your customers
using a shared channel that the same amount of effort creates a
much better customer experience. And if you have happy customers,
that's good for you. So what we find is, people on
the sell side, you know, people who sell software and people
who sell other services, a lot of the world's biggest
consulting organizations, a lot of the world's biggest purchasers as well, are in on it because they want to receive that
level of responsiveness and support. It's actually been entirely driven by customers
coming up with new use cases. And it's really exciting because this is part of
the vision of Slack from the very beginning. It took us years and years to get to this point. But now that it's happening, it's kind
of everything that we dreamed of. Stewart, we're over time. It's always so,
so fascinating to hear your thoughts, and it's clearly such an important topic. It's going to be a fascinating few months
as all of us figure out what the future of work looks like. Stewart, thank you
so much for joining us, and stay safe. Thank you, Greg. Thank you, Stewart and Greg, for such
an insightful conversation. And that brings us to the end of our opening
keynote, a huge thank you to our keynote speakers, our spotlight customers, and especially those
adorable employees of the future. Next up for you are the breakout sessions.
You can hear from our European customers and product experts on how they are
on the path to reinventing work. You might also want to attend
a Slack demo session and be part of discussions taking place
in our community workspace. There's a great menu of options available
for you to enjoy live and on demand. Finally, don't forget to tune in to the closing
keynote featuring vocal artists Box of Beats and four-time Olympic
gold medalist Venus Williams. Thank you and enjoy Frontiers Europe 2021.
