Slack is telling execs to limit their office days to 3 a week to encourage other staff to work from home
- Slack wants executives to work from home at least twice a week in order to encourage remote working.
- "Executives will lead by example" as the company becomes "digital first," CEO Stewart Butterfield told CNN.
- Slack would no longer have executive-only floors, he added.
Slack is telling its executives to come into the office less often so they can set an example for other employees to work remotely.
Stewart Butterfield, Slack's CEO and cofounder, told CNN that "executives will lead by example" as the company becomes "digital first."
"Our guidance to leaders is to spend fewer than three days per week in the office," Butterfield said.
Slack will have no dedicated executive floors, and senior leaders will focus their office time on "team events" and "customer interaction," he said.
"Getting teams together in person should have a purpose, such as team building, project kick offs and other events that are planned in advance, pairing flexibility with predictability," Butterfield said.
The company plans to redesign its office to focus on more flexibility, but would still work to support employees who wanted dedicated space to work in, he said. He didn't go into more details on this point.
Slack, which was acquired by Salesforce in December, is headquartered in San Francisco, and has 11 offices globally, including in London, Pune, and Melbourne.
Butterfield - who founded Slack in 2013 after selling Flickr to Yahoo - was one of 15 executives CNN asked about the future of work.
He was not the only CEO who envisioned a more remote, flexible future.
Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox, said that "the 40-hour office week" would become "a thing of the past."
LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky was also on the panel. In July, Insider reported that the job site would leave it up to managers to decide how often teams came into the office.