On Wednesday, Slack, an enterprise messaging platform, made its debut in India. By establishing a ‘Digital HQ,’ the platform hopes to assist Indian businesses in making the transition to a hybrid workplace.
Salesforce.com completed the $27.7 billion acquisition of Slack Technologies, Inc. in July 2021.
Slack rose to prominence in the workplace collaboration space as businesses quickly shifted to remote working during the pandemic’s early stages in early 2020. Slack is urging leaders to be as thoughtful in designing their digital workplaces as they were in designing their physical offices before the pandemic hit, as the impact of the pandemic fades and Indian companies increasingly shift to a hybrid work model.
“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.
Slack conducted a recent study with over 2,000 Indian knowledge workers titled “The Reinvention of Work,” which found that four out of five respondents wanted flexibility, and a significant 80% would look for work elsewhere if their employer didn’t provide it. As employee expectations change and the war for talent heats up, Indian companies are acutely aware that the Great Resignation and the Great Relocation are very real.
Indian knowledge workers said they waste an average of 47 minutes per day switching between the various apps they use to do their jobs, according to the same Slack study. One-fifth of those polled said they were losing 10 hours per week or nearly ten working weeks per year. Slack claims its platform is “purpose-built” to address productivity loss and improve employee experience, with over 2,600 app integrations.
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, already has a sizable following in India, which is one of the largest free user bases and one of the top ten markets for paid teams in the world. Slack has been operating Following the company’s acquisition of Astro in 2018, it established a product engineering team in Pune.
In the last year, the Slack India team has expanded to include a go-to-market function and now employs over 120 people across four offices in Pune, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Gurugram. Companies like Zomato, Dream sports, Freecharge, and Razorpay are among Slack’s customers in India.
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