By Leah Montebello
Tech could be a solution rather than a driver of the ‘quiet quitting’ phenomenon, says Slack vice president Pip White.
Working at one of the biggest winners of the pandemic, White is understandably reluctant to admit that the remote working tool contributed to one of the most talked about working trends of 2022.
A recent survey from Indeed found that 52 per cent of all workers feel burned out, up nearly ten per cent from pre-pandemic figures.
For those who aren’t accustomed with the term ‘quiet quitting’, it is essentially the trend of young people slowly withdrawing from work, coasting along whilst getting the bare minimum done during working hours.
Speaking with City A.M., White said this so-called phenomenon was caused by people being “disengaged and demotivated” with their jobs rather than feeling that technology was making an ‘easy-life’ easier to come by.
She explained that because tools like Slack are much more engaging than the traditional email, it breeds a “very transparent culture where everybody feels they can contribute to a thread or a channel that’s open”.
Around 300,000 messages are sent via Slack per second, with Revolut, the BBC and Gymshark as happy customers of the service.
White has been heading up the Salesforce integration in Europe, Middle East and Africa, which has been ongoing since the software giant bought Slack in 2021 for an estimated $27.7bn.
Calling Slack a “mission critical business” throughout the pandemic, White emphasised that the face of the business has inevitably changed as we head into a post-Covid era.
“We’re not going to go back to that nine to five, always in the office kind of work. Although I think definitely there’s a drive to do some office based work,” she said, adding that the merged company will be forced to adapt to evolving working patterns.
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