Does slack show what you are doing6/28/2023 ![]() You wouldn’t dial in your manager on every call to a client, but with Slack, that is how it can feel.” “Rather than being allowed to get on with work, there’s always someone looking over their shoulder. “Bosses are in chats and so people can feel as if they’re being watched and micromanaged,” says business coach Mary MacRory. Businesses may not just lose out on productivity but also on work-life balance if their employees believe they are being constantly monitored. Nevertheless, the problem many users are finding with Slack, and other instant-messaging based productivity tools, is not just needing to check them but rather the fact they are being used in the first place. “If someone really insists we can use it, but only so long as there are milestones in a project where we agree to have proper meetings.” “It’s often out of our control because a new client will ask us to collaborate with them on it, but my push back is always that there is nothing wrong with email for messages and Dropbox for large files,” she says. But if you have to, don’t lose face to face contact. To help achieve this, she has two simple Slack rules. When she set up her design company, Perq Studio, three years ago, Laura Giffard committed to allowing staff to work to a four day week. This productivity issue has led some executives to dramatically curb the use of Slack. People are still getting work done, she believes, but they are making up for lost time by working longer hours. Scientists found no difference in distraction between Slack and emails but one of the researchers involved, Gloria Marks, said the true cost is not so much productivity but stress. This view agrees with research from the University of California and Humboldt University, which found workers can lose up to 23 minutes on a task every time they are interrupted. The result is workers are increasingly finding it difficult to concentrate fully on the task they're doing. ![]() Beyond a loss of production, it has the longer term impact that users are either distracted by the tool or anticipating being distracted by it. The problem isn't necessarily Slack as a platform, but how people use instant messaging software. The result is workers end up checking messages about work, rather than doing any, he surmises.
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