What Slack is doing to our offices—and our minds

Walking into the Slack offices in downtown San Francisco feels like walking into a Slack channel online.

Brightly colored sofas in the shape of hashtags fill the shared spaces, surrounded by a comfortable margin of airy whitespace. As company rep Katie Wattie leads me around, I realize that every conference room is named after an emoji. There are emojis everywhere I look. Clocks have emoji instead of numbers. New employees have foil balloons floating over their desks with the :heart eyes: emoji emblazoned on them.

Slack CTO Cal Henderson is waiting for us in the ⛵ room. I've been so inundated with emoji that I have to ask: "Do you guys have a poop emoji room?" Henderson doesn't bat an eye. "Not even the bathrooms have that on them, which is surprising," he muses in a British accent that has been slightly eroded after many years in the States. With his slightly mussed brown hair and casual shirt, Henderson looks the part of a Silicon Valley executive.

And if Slack succeeds, Henderson's company will soon export this same casual, information-rich culture of Silicon Valley tech companies to the world.

The lure of Slack is simple. It promises to make work teams more productive by eliminating meetings and e-mail. The platform integrates an easy-to-use chat system with tools for committing code, making payments, monitoring backups, and more. Plus Slack is fun, which is not a word usually applied to enterprise software. Maybe that's because Slack is aimed at consumers. In fact, many people sign up for free Slack accounts just to chat with friends.

Slack may not currently have the reach of Outlook, but that could change. With over 2.3 million daily users, a a rumored $3.6 billion valuation, and hundreds of apps in its growing ecosystem of custom-built tools, world domination isn't implausible. The app's appeal isn't just about functionality. It's about the needs of a new generation of people who work in virtual teams.

Companies have been experimenting for over a decade with social enterprise software, not to mention standard office communications packages like Outlook. Slack is different. It's not designed to supplement your office software; it's designed to replace it. Even more radically, Slack aims to replace the office itself, creating a platform for people who work entirely online. The question is, what will happen to office culture when everything we do and say at work is converted into a string of emoji-laced texts—especially when those texts are logged and searchable forever?

Spawn of IRC

Working in Slack feels like working at Slack for one simple reason. Henderson and his team built the software for themselves when they were developing the game Glitch with Tiny Speck, a company whose staff was split between San Francisco and Vancouver. "We started with IRC because we needed to chat somehow," Henderson recalls. "We tried things for collaboration, like having a constant video link or open Skype calls all day. But the thing that was consistent was IRC."

IRC, or internet relay chat, is a 28-year-old protocol for text-based communication that's open and incredibly versatile. Henderson and his colleagues built their entire workflow on top of it. They shared game assets, migrated a game server with it, committed code—and, of course, maintained contact with the whole team. When they ceased work on Glitch in 2012, Henderson says, they agreed that they would never work together again without a customized IRC system like what they had at Tiny Speck.

That's when they had the moment of realization. They already had a set of valuable toolsets that lived on top of IRC. Maybe it could be an actual product. The trouble with IRC has always been that it works like a dream for people with technical expertise, but it's a pain in the ass for non-technical users. If they could give less enterprising teams the experience they'd had with Glitch over IRC, they might have a winning app on their hands.

So Henderson and his team plunged into building Slack without doing any user research, other than on themselves. "We found it useful and thought surely others would," Henderson says. Their only direct competitors at the time were Hipchat and Campfire, and the latter is now defunct. With no experience building enterprise software, they used their backgrounds in consumer software to guide them.

This turned out to be the right move. Not many companies use apps for collaboration, but most people have considerable experience with social media no matter where they work. On a daily basis, people today communicate in real time using SMS, Facebook messenger, Whatsapp, Wechat, and more. "People in social settings were used to having many different apps to talk to people," Henderson explains. "But it hadn't yet come to business."

Social media goes to work

Tech companies have been experimenting with bringing social media into the workplace for years. In 2007, IBM launched a company-wide social network called Beehive, which allowed employees to create and share personal profiles, organize events, and connect with other people who share their interests. Thousands of employees joined, using it to find collaborators they never could have met otherwise.

That same year, HP launched an "enterprise social media" system called WaterCooler. Like Beehive, WaterCooler used a combination of profiles and microblogging, mostly to help people find each other when they were working on similar projects.

Other experiments with social media have been happening informally in offices all over the world. Employees at the MITRE Corporation, an organization that employs over 7,500 people to conduct work for US government agencies, created an internal wiki called MITREpedia in 2005. NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab has a similar internal wiki called JPL Wired, created in 2010. Both organizations found that there was no need to introduce specialized software like WaterCooler—their employees spontaneously started building wikis to document important discoveries and share scientific information.

What's different now is that social media apps aren't just supplemental tools to help people in large organizations find each other or keep track of big projects. They are replacing offices entirely. For people who work in virtual teams, apps like Slack are the workplace.

This is an unprecedented situation, and management experts are struggling to understand it. Information studies researcher Casey Pierce says most research has explored what happens when a workplace transitions to using apps for communication, creating a "mixed" environment of in-person meetings, e-mail, and other apps. But Slack promises get rid of all that, instead offering one software platform to rule them all.

"When there's no other workplace technology that's in competition with using social media, we'd expect different communication norms," Pierce mused. "How do we think about organizational culture when colleagues have never met face-to-face? What are the starting points for norms and expectations? We're going to see vastly different ways of coordinating."