I agree with Slack's position on this. Muting or blocking a co-worker is not a long-term solution. These types of issues in a work environment need to be resolved, not ignored.
Exactly. And the right solution in this case would have been to contact HR and file a harassment complaint. (Or alternatively, tell the harasser that if they don't stop immediately, HR will be notified.)
If Slack is being used as an office communication system, the company needs to make sure that people treat it as part of their office (like corporate e-mail), not as some kind of social network.
In practice how this is works is that the person being harassed goes to HR, HR does nothing, and then that person quits. Nothing usually happens to harasser. The point of HR is to protect the company from its employees, not help mitigate disputes.
This is untrue. Most HR, while the companies agent first, sees harassment as a huge liability and loves to be able to take action with sufficient documentation.
What about when the documentation is incomplete and it's one person's word against another's on a subjective body of messages and actions, and where the aggressor is often of a higher rank?
Sexual harassment often lacks sufficient documentation, and that's precisely why HR is usually not seen as an ally to the victim.
In some cases evidence is scarce, but in the story told in this article, there would seem to be a set of messages recorded in Slack, so it wouldn't just be one person's word against another. If the person being harassed wanted to make a really strong case, they would have sent a Slack reply saying "Don't ever send me this kind of message again!" to have a record of it.
This also makes it scary for HR, since if they do nothing and the victim sues, the Slack messages could turn up during discovery.
(I'm also guessing that this kind of behavior suggests that the aggressor is not of higher rank. Someone with real power over the victim probably wouldn't just stalk them on Slack, and any manager would be acutely aware that you don't want to say things like that in writing.)
She should talk to her company's management. It's not a social network for meeting people, it's a work tool. If someone was harassing me in person at work, I would speak to my team leader. Same if they did it on Skype or Slack.
I think there's a difference between asking Slack to police it, versus just having the ability to mute a conversation or limited do not disturb.
There are conversations where you need to be more or less involved, and choosing your level of involvement on a per conversation basis, rather than on the entire account would be helpful.
Of course it looks like a minor "feature request" but I'm sure rolling that out would actually be a bit of an under taking. I know that I had to cull the channels I was in and other conversations so that the alerts I was receiving were actually pertinent to me, especially on the mobile app. Not as much of a problem on Desktop, but none the less.
How would a mute button make her situation better? That will not make the problem (the guy's behavior) go away. He'll realize she muted him, and find other ways. Tell HR.
I agree with the other commenters, Slack shouldn't be responsible for managing workplace harassment.
But on another note, does Skype for Business, Webex Teams, or any other workplace IM application allow blocking of other users? The author should be comparing Slack to those instead of social media that you can easily opt out of. You can't really opt out of corporate IM.
It's sort of common in the older generation of more enterpisey chat platforms. Ethical firewalls are a huge requirement in some industries, and a lot of them are implemented as just block lists.
The ability to mute would be useful for more than just the harassment example. I frequently get useless notifications from Slack bots, which either give me useless tips on how to use Slack or ask me some useless gallup questions. It's mind boggling that Slack not only thinks these constant interruptions to everyone's workday are somehow beneficial -- but also that people shouldn't have the ability to turn them off.
In this context (corporate), this is an HR problem. I don't think I can mute fellow employees on Teams either. But yes, Slack gets used in other contexts which really do need a block function.
