[Music]
uh we got to check in on
zoom shares they're dragging a little
bit just a day after bumping higher
thanks to an acquisition of a german
translation firm but
could this be a sign not just a
profit-taking but zoom fatigue
kicking in are people kind of tired of
scheduling a zoom and then sending the
invite and then having to appear on a
less than flattering laptop or phone cam
and then saying
brad you're muted liz you're muted
how many times has that happened
workplace messaging app slack today
unveiling what it believes is a better
way as it awaits the completion of its
acquisition by salesforce
slack has just introduced a new suite of
features including
slack huddles an audio first way to
start live conversations
in a way faster more spontaneous way i
guess slack ceo and co-founder stuart
butterfield
ready to huddle with our viewers on this
news hi stuart good to see you
you know what i think is interesting
about this i mean if we start with
huddles
this is sort of the work version of
clubhouse but you got to explain to our
our viewers
why they would pick this over any other
choice that's out there
all right well you know i think it's
it's for certain circumstances
the easiest way to imagine and this
might sound a little strange is like a
taxi dispatch or a police radio where
you can be tuned in or not but if you're
tuned in and someone talks you hear it
and the difference is it's a little bit
like
if you're a couple desks over for me and
i shout out a question everyone
overhears it
and we might have a conversation that
lasts two minutes and then kind of
peters out but you wouldn't do that on a
on a zoom call
the conversation doesn't peter out it's
for the full 30 minutes
and the hope is we can recreate some of
the spontaneity and then the serendipity
of those office conversations
i do want to say though that it doesn't
replace um
zoom wholesale we're still a happy zoom
customer it's just
you know we have had for a long time
that eight people get in a conference
room and have a white board and we have
now
the uh screen that has a bunch of
rectangles and video feeds of people's
faces
there's more tools that are necessary in
order for us to cover the whole kind of
spectrum of interaction
and also to create new stuff
so you basically have it all you got a
big conversation you can just check in
with somebody versus
making a schedule of hey make sure to
tune in so we can discuss this but
your mic isn't always hot correct no you
might
you have control over all of that but
you know we have seen with small teams
where they you know work together really
closely you can imagine like say some
marketers launching a website
someone will join and it's different
than starting a call
and the call ends they just join it's
there whether they're uh present or not
their speakers are on if someone else
joins and says something they'll hear it
and uh it becomes really powerful
especially for those small group
conversations but you know it doesn't
replace the need for
real-time video communications um it's
more
of a of a supplement and speaking of
supplements i think we've moved from a
world where
um people think about digital
technologies as a supplement to
in-person meetings
to something like the other way around
and maybe we haven't all realized that
yet
but software is a lot more essential to
the way that we operate as we saw in the
pandemic we could give up our offices
but we couldn't give up our software
yeah i i get that um you know the last
time we spoke
you hinted that there were so many of
these ideas that were coming
including slack atlas when there's a
whole suite of other competitors out
there whether it's microsoft teams or
google meet
etc give me a sense of what i get
special from slack
atlas all right well slack atlas
is a kind of a supercharged
employee directory so obviously
employees get some power to edit them
the difference is though they don't have
to we are able to pull data from
multiple sources the hr
system and uh and and other sources
inside the company
to create something that makes it very
easy to find out about your colleagues
and that becomes essential in a world
where
many of us are not going to be in the
same physical location or even just for
large companies you know
companies have hundreds of thousands of
employees they're never all in one place
for us 35 i think now of our employees
started post-pandemic and so it's an
excellent way to
get to know people the teams that
they're on the kind of the skills and um
the whole kind of spectrum of their
personality
stuart we are going through a change
because obviously the world is emerging
once again but
what should business managers understand
about how their employees have changed
over the past
15 months during the lockdowns i was
having conversations with some of my
co-workers who said you know
i would really actually appreciate one
or a day a week maybe where i could
actually be at home
and still continue to remain very much a
contributor
not take a vacation day but work from
home say by using tools like slack
what are you hearing in the broader
sense from managers and what should they
be thinking about
it's a great question and i would say
there's three things and the first and
maybe most important
is to recognize the opportunity we have
now to
to really be creative and to rethink
some of the processes that we've
you know just kind of uh take for
granted it's unless you're a
professional philosopher it's hard to be
questioning everything
all the time but we do go with a lot of
assumptions that aren't necessarily
the most effective so one
time to get creative the second one is
this is going to be a market-based
decision individual executives
individual companies are not going to
get to decide
the degree to which people work from
offices or not just like they don't get
to decide
unilaterally on on compensation
employees who are faced with two job
offers one from a company
that insists that you're there five days
a week and one that gives you the option
i think everyone will choose the option
i don't mean that they don't want to
see one another or they don't want to to
be in person because in person
collaboration can be great but
you know i have a six and a half year
old and i think in the old
sorry six and a half a week old
big big difference um and uh i'm just
coming back
from that sleep deprivation steward
exactly that's that's it uh in in the
old world i think it would be like
there'd be this anxiety about you know
having to get back on the train
for an hour every morning go to the
office and come back and the babies
asleep
with the flexibility to work from home
it kind of transforms the relationships
you can have
with your family uh the number of places
you can live and then i guess the last
thing i would say is
there's a real benefit to employers
um in being able to hire outside those
places where they have offices so we
have i think 15 offices around the world
um obviously there are hundreds of
millions of people
who would be potentially good candidates
who don't live in those areas
so when people say you know our
employees are only going to have to come
into the office two days a week
they're still presupposing that everyone
lives within commuting distance
so um i think there's going to be more
changes than people really anticipate
yeah um quickly before we go when's this
merchant going through i mean is this
your last quarter
as a publicly traded company salesforce
just had an eight billion dollar bond
float uh
sale it went really well you know to
fund the acquisition
when can we uh crack the champagne open
well we're hoping in the next month or
so but the department of justice and
their infinite wisdom will make that
decision for us and i'm sure will be
the right one okay all right well uh
we'll be there watching thank you stuart
we really appreciate it