Shopify reportedly appoints 'channel champions' and shuts down Slack channels when conversations heat up

When Slack threads become contentious, the company sometimes shuts them down and employs "channel champions" to keep tabs on employee Slack channels, Insider reported Tuesday.

The outlet spoke to eight people who still work at Shopify or have done so in the past, all of whom were quoted anonymously.

Shopify laid off 10% of its workforce in July, saying its bet that the COVID-19-era e-commerce business would continue "didn't pay off." The company hosts e-commerce websites for businesses.

“What we see now is that the mix is ​​back to roughly where pre-Covid data would have suggested it should be at this point,” Shopify CEO Tobias wrote at the time. Lütke.

But, in the months leading up to the layoffs, employees began to feel a growing sense of swashbuckling at the company, which had previously been known for having a more laid-back, relaxed culture around sharing. information, Insider reported.

Shopify told Entrepreneur via email that Slack is "a tool to help us facilitate asynchronous decision-making, build community, and most importantly, get the work done that we are doing on behalf of our millions of merchants".

"Given our large, dispersed workforce, we have policies to ensure our Slack remains a productive tool for sharing information, collaborating, and building a healthy culture," the spokesperson added.< /p>

After the company walked away completely, it "put measures in place to discourage negative and off-topic discussions about the company and its plans," Insider reported, citing conversations with employees.< /p>

It also meant shutting down channels or threads that were heading, which would have happened when Shopify employees complained about employee stock packages after Shopify's stock plunged in early 2022 (It was trading at $136 per share on Jan. 3 and has hit around $32 today.)

"People were very bold in Slack," an employee who was laid off this summer told the outlet.

Something similar happened when employees found a noose emoji in Slack in the summer of 2020 and, more recently, when employees were discussing an article from The Information from March 2022. After more Of 300 comments, a company executive, Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering, expressed his gratitude for people's thoughts and then closed the thread, according to screenshots reviewed by Insider. /p>

After going remote, Shopify began asking people to be volunteer "channel champions," which any channel with more than 100 people should have, Insider reported.

These "channel champions" set rules and report inappropriate behavior and hate speech.

But, in practice, champions often didn't flag "off-topic" conversations because they feared being seen as snitches, a former Shopify employee told the outlet.

A Harvard Business Review study published in July found that certain types of remote monitoring can cause employees to take more action and be less productive.

"This effect was driven by a shift in employees' sense of agency and personal responsibility: monitoring employees led them to feel subconsciously less responsible for their own conduct, which ultimately made them made more likely to act in ways they would otherwise consider immoral,” the study writes.