Chat applications have become a major way employees stay connected,
but some see an uptick in agitation and bullying
BY:
Alexis de Hahn
Avocat Reporteur
PROJECT COUNSEL MEDIA
24 August 2020 (Athens, Greece) – Popular messaging tools such as Evite and Slack make instant communication across a company simple – one reason its usage has surged during the pandemic. A shift potentially as monumental as the movement of workers into factories during the Industrial Revolution has swept the globe, only this transition happened in months, and moved people in the opposite direction – back home. Despite it speed, we’re still in the earliest stages of the Work-From-Home Revolution, and it could take years or even decades of trial and error to get right. Already we are hearing stories of how projects take longer, collaboration is harder. Training new workers is a struggle. There seems to be a common refrain: “This is not going to be sustainable.”
However, the drive is on. This shift has yielded an avalanche of data and insights into the habits and technology workers are using to stay productive. They paint a portrait of firms scrambling to use the equipment and software on hand – laptops, phones, internet connections and cloud services – while also rapidly discovering and adopting new technology. The biggest story has been Zoom. It had 10 million daily meeting participants in December; as of July 1st it was hitting 450 million a day.
Many companies have embraced Evite and Slack and similar tools as a more efficient way to communicate. In the first weeks after many companies issued work-from-home orders in March, usage soared. The Wall Street Journal reported:
On March 25, Slack Technologies said its platform had 12.5 million simultaneous users, up from 10 million two weeks earlier. Microsoft Corp. said in April that the number of daily users on its Teams platform, a competitor to Slack, had grown to 75 million people, more than double the number in early March.
It made sense. The technology allows workers to swap information in seconds and respond more quickly than in email with emojis and funny videos, making it easy to set an informal tone. As many offices remain closed, such platforms have become virtual water coolers, one of the primary ways homebound staffers stay in touch with each other.
But as the old saying goes ….
When everyone is working virtually, instant-messaging platforms like Evite and Slack have become dumping grounds for grievances, passive aggressiveness and other exchanges that are best left for private conversations. Over the weekend there was a sludge of stories from The Verge, The Wall Street Journal, SignalOne, CNN Business, etc. The casual nature of many interactions means some people let their guards down, trash talk and act unprofessionally on the channels. Over the weekend, California employment lawyer Amber Bissell was quoted in a Wall Street Journal saying since the pandemic she has noticed an uptick in harassment complaints related to online communications. She is working on a complaint involving a large Bay Area technology company where Slack was used extensively. Her client, a female employee there, had flagged an image posted in a Slack channel by a male colleague as inappropriate. Over the next few days she received Slack messages calling her gendered slurs and “uptight,” while some colleagues sent cruel memes on Slack.
The Verge noted companies have now been forced to install tracking tools to police online channels for signs of bullying. One of the more notable cases occurred at the New York Times. Bari Weiss, a writer and editor for the New York Times opinion section, resigned in July, describing a hostile culture that played out, in part, online. In her resignation letter she said “My work and my character are openly demeaned on companywide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in”, noting some colleagues had posted emojis of an ax next to her name in Slack exchanges. A Times spokeswoman says the newspaper disagreed with Weiss’s description of events but had taken steps to monitor comments on Slack that violated its guidelines.
At the luggage startup Away, co-founder Steph Korey said in December that she would resign as CEO after leaked Slack messages, published in a story in the Verge, showed Korey openly criticizing employees on the platform. Korey reversed course, saying the decision to resign had been a mistake and she would keep her job. An Away spokesman declined to comment.
NOTE: Slack provides and continues to develop tools for employers to monitor Slack traffic, and also tools for users to control which messages get their attention and let them reduce noise in Slack.
On CNN Business over the weekend, Alexandra Buechner, an attorney who represents employers in employment-law cases and who has seen a rise in Slack cases, said:
Like other direct messaging services, Slack has created a more casual type of work communication in which messages and jokes can be taken the wrong way. It’s a slippery slope because it’s so informal. We are suggesting companies develop a handbook that includes harassment policies with a section about chat services. They need to cover themselves.
But … many companies are leery of being overly restrictive. Chat applications can serve as one of the main outlets for remote employees to raise concerns or share grievances with each other or management. One CEO noted “You want to avoid passive-aggressive culture, but you want to be transparent, you want to be authentic. It is up to bosses to encourage people to share dissent and disagreement, including on chat forums. The two ways you do that is literally asking for it – and working hard to extract it – but also by allowing greater degrees of collaboration to occur in the workplace so that people’s points of view get out.”
And of course, this opens the whole issue of whether the general toxicity in workplace applications is actually a sign of deeper problems in a company’s culture and how employees relate to each other. If workers don’t feel they have a voice on serious issues, resentment can build, turning channels ugly. At the end of the day, this is a leadership problem. This is a new, transparent world, and you can see that Slack and Twitter have the same problem. They allow you to broadcast the thoughts in your head in close to real-time. There’s a reason why we were equipped with the survival skill of filtering. When we allow technology to bypass that, bad things happen. Social media is simply a force-multiplier for stupidity.
