The author nails my thoughts on Slack (and its OS clone Mattermost). It is less a communications tool, more of a productivity tracker.
I've worked in places where it was unofficially compulsory to have Slack always open. If you didn't respond to a message is a timely fashion then you'd be asked why. It became the case that Activity on Slack = Productivity.
This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that I think Slack is a pretty poor way to do workplace communication. It's the textual equivalent of shouting out a question to the whole office. Everything seems to mush together in to one big conversation about everything that is hard to track and search.
My thoughts on your comments are the same as my thoughts on the article. These are cultural problems that Slack is simply exposing. If there was no Slack, something else would fill the need for your middle management to track everyone's 'productivity'.
I've worked in places where it was unofficially compulsory to have Slack always open. If you didn't respond to a message is a timely fashion then you'd be asked why. It became the case that Activity on Slack = Productivity.
This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that I think Slack is a pretty poor way to do workplace communication. It's the textual equivalent of shouting out a question to the whole office. Everything seems to mush together in to one big conversation about everything that is hard to track and search.