Slack launches in India to help companies adopt a digital-first workplace
Premium- In July 2021, Salesforce.com completed the acquisition of Slack Technologies, Inc. for $27.7 billion.
Slack, an enterprise messaging platform, officially launched in India on Wednesday. The platform aims to help Indian companies navigate the transition to a hybrid workplace by establishing what it calls a ‘Digital HQ’.
In July 2021, Salesforce.com completed the acquisition of Slack Technologies, Inc. for $27.7 billion.
Slack gained prominence in the workplace collaboration space as enterprises rapidly shifted to remote working in early 2020 during the onset of the pandemic. Today, as the impact of the pandemic eases and Indian companies increasingly shift to a hybrid work model, Slack is calling for leaders to be as thoughtful in designing their digital workplaces as they did in designing their physical offices before the pandemic hit.
“Adopting Slack as a Digital HQ allows Indian companies to connect their teams, tools, customers, and partners in a digital place that’s fast, flexible and inclusive for a work-from-anywhere world," the company said in a statement.
A recent study titled ‘The Reinvention of Work’ conducted by Slack with over 2,000 Indian knowledge workers, revealed that four in five respondents had a desire for flexibility, and a significant 80% would seek a role elsewhere if their employer didn’t accommodate this. Indian companies are keenly aware that the Great Resignation and the Great Relocation are very real, as employee expectations change and the war for talent heats up.
In the same Slack study, Indian knowledge workers said they were wasting an average of 47 minutes a day switching between the various apps they use to do their jobs. One in five respondents said they were losing 10 hours a week – that is nearly 10 working weeks a year. With over 2,600 app integrations, Slack said its platform is “purpose-built" to address loss in productivity and improve employee experience.
Indian e-commerce platform Meesho has embraced Slack as its Digital HQ to save time and streamline processes. “With the pivot towards remote working, multiple apps and systems were a huge hindrance to productivity and collaboration. We are glad to have Slack as a partner where everything happens in one channel, and what used to take a couple of days is now resolved in a matter of hours," said Shikhar Saxena, group product manager, Meesho.
Slack, which has users in over 150 countries globally, already has a significant following in India – representing one of the largest free user bases for Slack and positioned in its top 10 markets for paid teams globally. Slack has been operating in India for four years, establishing a product engineering team in Pune in 2018 following the company’s acquisition of Astro.
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The Slack India team has since grown to include a go-to-market function in the last year, and now has over 120 employees across four offices in Pune, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Gurugram. In India, Slack counts companies such as Zomato, Dreamsports, Freecharge, Razorpay, among its list of customers.