How Slack Became The Soul of Business, And Is Here To Stay

My team adopted Slack long before I did, but that’s part of the story of how this tech platform edged out nearly every other chat tool to become the backbone of internal communications at tens of thousands of companies, schools, political campaigns and organizations. Often promoted as the solution to email overload, the tool is deceptively simple and as this article explores, it has enabled a new era of transparency and bottom-up communications within many companies. It has also gamified business conversations and offered a backchannel that can often enable negative conversations.

What happens when corporate cultures are built around the hashtag based conversations that happen on Slack? And who are we professionally when more of our time is spent working remotely and our identities must be embedded in every topic-based chat message we send? These are not-so-simple questions that the rise of Slack is fueling as the modern workplace becomes more reliant on digital collaboration tools instead of face to face conversations.