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Slackforce

In between meeting a therapy pig and meditating by the Dreamforce waterfall, I found time to talk to a bunch of folks about the changing world of work. (Please clap.) And there was one main message: Hours of meetings each day is so last year.

Dreamforce is primarily a Salesforce show. Still, Slack featured prominently throughout.

• One of Slack’s main rallying cries throughout the conference was that we should cut down on meetings.
• That’s part of the goal behind Slack canvas, a collaborative document embedded within channels and built from Salesforce-owned Quip.
• Instead of just a dead calendar event, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield’s vision is a comprehensive, easily digestible record of the meeting that makes sense, even if you didn’t attend.
• “We want people to be able to work in whatever way works for them with flexible schedules, in meetings and out of meetings, so it doesn’t have to be this, ‘I’m on a 30-minute video call in order to get anything done,’” Slack Chief Product Officer Tamar Yehoshua told Protocol.

There were quite a few Slack-related sessions, also aimed at helping people reduce meetings. Sure, the fake waterfalls and Matthew McConaughey were splashy, but Dreamforce also hosted hundreds of sessions, like how to improve your Salesforce automations (exciting stuff). But the anti-meeting movement also featured prominently.

• Tamara Jensen, a principal technical project manager at T-Mobile, spoke at a Slack-related session about how to cancel more meetings. She’s leading efforts at her company to replace unnecessary meetings with Slack, though adoption has been uneven across various teams.
• But no matter what Slack does, Jensen said some people are just going to have some meeting FOMO.
• “That does take a little bit of training,” Jensen said. “People have to get comfortable saying no and trust that it's going to be offline and available to them.”

Many sessions had to do with the future of flexible, remote work. Dreamforce wasn’t all about killing the meeting. Sessions also focused on the new hybrid and remote reality.

• One panel was about how to lead in a flexible work world, with speakers like Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud and Calendly CEO Tope Awotona.
• Sud said her view is that “nothing is sacred,” and that now is the time for openness and experimentation. “Part of our job is to know where we can have a philosophy and certainty, but also where we need to be agile and flexible.”

Even with a vastly different working world and a smaller Dreamforce compared to years past, the conference environment felt rather normal. Or as normal as a Salesforce cartoon elephant extravaganza can be.