Yahoo News Age of the office is coming to an end, warns British Slack chief set for $750m payout
The age of the office is coming to an end with rows of individual desks set to be banished for good, British entrepreneur and Slack co-founder Cal Henderson has said.
Mr Henderson, who is set to land a $750m (£554m) payout from the blockbuster sale of his workplace messaging app to Salesforce, said the way people work will change forever after Covid.
Speaking at the Web Summit today, the 39-year-old Slack chief technology officer said that had the pandemic lasted a brief period then people would have “come back to normal”.
But he added: “The longer that we’ve been through this state, the more it feels like this is the new normal, and that will permanently affect the way everybody works post-pandemic."
Mr Henderson - a keen video gamer who was born in Birmingham - said the office will become similar to a social hub where employees can build relationships with fellow staff, whole working remotely for much of the time.
His comments follow a report earlier in the year by advisory group McKinsey, which advocated for the switch from cubicles to more open planned collaborative settings. The group said that depending on the company as much as 80pc of office space could be given up for collaborative rooms.
Alongside videoconferencing app Zoom, Slack is part of a vanguard of digital firms which have thrived during the pandemic as workers and families were forced to communicate online. Slack aims to replace the need for internal emails through channel-based messaging.
The company was sold to Marc Benioff’s Salesforce in a $27.7bn cash plus stock mega-deal on Tuesday. The deal will rank as one of the largest-ever software acquisitions.
The alliance unites the two internet companies against Microsoft, the world’s biggest software company, which stunted Slack’s rise by launching a rival service in 2017 that it has since pushed out to hundreds of millions of Office subscribers.
Slack’s stock had fallen more than 20pc since it went public last year before rumours of the Salesforce takeover emerged, despite the rise in demand for corporate messaging services. Shares in Salesforce, which is valued at $220bn, fell 4pc after Tuesday's announcement.
