Like many working teams across the planet, we used to suffocate under the avalanche of our daily email inbox - each new ping interrupting our productivity, forcing us to work in a reactive way, and destroying our sanity with information overload and high task switching costs.

It was hard to get any deep work done.

And the measure of a good day’s work was never going to be an empty inbox.

Our girledworld team works across time zones and geographies, and so we desperately needed one place to collaborate and capture a single source of truth, where our communication could be divided into neat streams, and we could up-speed and onboard people quickly, easily, transparently - and without email.

So we moved to Slack to simplify. And it changed the way we work. For good.

According to Founder Stuart Butterfield, the goal of Slack is to end the world of email as we know it - at least inside companies. He predicts we will see a rapid shift away from internal email over the next five years, and a move to channel communications to improve workplace efficiency, transparency and collaboration.

Turns out that Butterfield’s five-year prediction may be realised in a much shorter time frame, because cloud-based collaboration and team tools have never been more relevant or more in-demand as COVID-19 turns traditional workplaces upside down and inside out.

Across the world, remote working is the new norm thrust on organisations, many of which are encountering new messaging services for the first time, or at the very least interacting with them in ways they never have before, and Slack is positioning itself as one of the fastest growing remote working platforms of the moment. 

 But it certainly didn’t start out that way.

San Francisco-based Slack actually began as an internal tool for CEO Stewart Butterfield's (failed) video game development company, and has grown into a key player in today’s new workplace reality.

So the COVID-19 forced migration of millions of employees to work from home has accelerated what was a startup business still yet to hit its market penetration predictions. Consider that it took the company four years to reach 1 million simultaneous users, but it hit 10 million on March 10 in one of its most productive weeks ever, and two weeks later topped 12.5 million globally. This is steep growth by anyone’s measure, and these figures are expected to continue to rise for Slack in the coming weeks and months as teams across the world continue to collaborate remotely using technology platforms. (Other team tools such as Zoom, Microsoft’s Teams and Google Hangouts have also seen unprecedented levels of user growth in a short period.)

And it’s likely the extraordinary recent gains will not just sit in the short-term urgency of managing working from home due to a global pandemic. They will reach far beyond to define a whole new working normal on the other side of the COVID-19 curve.

Butterfield says the unprecedented and extreme circumstances of the COVID-19 social distancing and isolation measures have forced workplaces to adapt rapidly, and this will likely change the corporate and academic landscape for good moving forward. 

We simply can’t go back to how we worked and communicated before.

“What's happened here is that we have skipped a couple of years in what's an inevitable transition ... away from inboxes and from an individual approach to a team approach,” he told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald recently. 

“The email is not going away because it has its uses, but frankly, it’s a terrible choice in these sort of dynamic situations.”

“And that’s a shift that’s inevitable over the next decade. And I think it just accelerated by a couple of years because there were also people who thought Slack was great and really enjoyed it, but essentially just used it in the way that they might have used AIM or Yahoo messenger or something like that 20 years ago. It was essentially for DM (direct messaging). (But now people) are suddenly beginning to bring in integrations with Salesforce, or marketing automation tools, or their HR system,” he told New Yorker magazine.

But it’s not just Silicon Valley startups and corporates benefitting from Slack’s quick communication and collaboration capabilities - because with the switch to remote teaching and learning, universities, schools and other academic institutions are also jumping on board.

“More or less every elite academic research institution is running on Slack. There’s virologists, and epidemiologists, and pathologists who are relying on it,” Butterfield continued in New York magazine.

According to a Gartner survey of 317 chief financial officers and finance leaders on March 30, nearly three out of four organisations will move at least 5% of their previously on-site workforce to permanently remote positions post-COVID-19, so there will be a greater need to adopt collaboration tools as part of everyday ways of working.

So it just might be, for Stuart Butterfield at least, that the silver lining of COVID-19 is the shift in our everyday work and team practices he envisioned, the slow death of email once and for all - and a chance for more businesses and teams like ours to embrace the digital tools we need to collaborate, innovate - and get more good work done.

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Slack is a partner company in the girledworld Workplace Mentoring and Employability Skill Building Program, supported by the Victorian State Government along with multiple major businesses and technology sector companies including Square, AGL Energy, EY, the Australian Football League, News Corp and more.

The online state-wide program is activating virtual workplaces across Victoria until June 26, 2020, to boost future career opportunities, employability skills and invaluable industry mentorship of hundreds of female high school and tertiary students. 

Students are remotely connected with leading women in the Victorian business, corporate and startup ecosystem, and given critical insights into the new world of work, STEM and workforce soft skills to better inform their career goal-setting and decision-making.

Learn more here.