For many companies, the year 2020 will remain exceptional. This is particularly true for Slack, this company which has developed a communication tool very popular in the professional world. At the end of November, after only seven years of existence, and while it is still in deficit, it hit the jackpot by reaching an agreement to be bought by the American Salesforce for $ 27.7 billion (about 23.5 billion dollars). Billions of Euro’s).
Above all, she is one of those companies which saw their results soar in the context of the crisis due to Covid-19. Its turnover grew by 43% in 2020 to reach 900 million dollars. In view of its latest quarterly results, the billion dollar revenue mark should be crossed without difficulty.
In a context where a very large number of businesses have had to reorganize to continue operating with homebound workers, Slack has proven to be a useful tool. Paradoxically, Stewart Butterfield, leader and co-founder of Slack, had never made teleworking one of the arguments to promote his solution. For the 48-year-old Canadian entrepreneur, the product was first and foremost designed to “Coordinate the activity of the teams, allow them to always be aligned”. “I was one of those who, thirteen months ago, would have said that we could not maintain productivity at Slack by teleworking”. The facts proved him wrong … and food for thought.
Outside the scope
If only on recruitment issues. While the company hired massively in 2020, the workforce increased by 30% to exceed 2,500 employees, she gave herself the freedom to retain candidates outside the perimeter of her offices where no one could go. “It allowed us to discover new talents”, admits Stewart Butterfield, while already drawing the consequences: “Once the crisis is over, we are not going to ask them to move to come back within our walls. “
A lesson which, according to him, goes well beyond the sole situation of Slack. In his eyes, the Covid-19 has come to undermine a business world “Depending on organizational models over a hundred years old where everyone should be in the same space at the same time, it is a form of tyranny”. However, with the containment measures, employees have gained work autonomy and developed a taste for this flexibility.
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