This award goes to a visionary leader who recognised and seized the opportunity to fundamentally transform and improve the way their business runs with Slack.
As the executive vice president and chief technology officer for leading content company ViacomCBS, Phil Wiser is receiving the Visionary Award for using Slack to support the evolution of ViacomCBS’s global business and empower its employees to meet the future of work.
Upon the completion of the merger between CBS and Viacom in December 2019, Wiser knew Slack would be an important tool for the transformation of the combined company. ‘Ultimately it’s not about deploying the technology, it’s about changing the way people work,’ Wiser told Business Insider. ViacomCBS partnered with Slack to help build a strongly connected internal culture committed to communication and collaboration. The company enlisted Slack ‘ambassadors’ to advise in the development and execution of an effective roll-out strategy to integrate Slack seamlessly across the ViacomCBS organisation and to train employees effectively.
The impact of the pandemic in March 2020 accelerated this integration, as ViacomCBS adapted to a remote environment while continuing to meet the increased demand for media and entertainment. Wiser highlighted how ViacomCBS brands have incorporated Slack to increase productivity, describing how the CBS newsroom uses Slack channels in the newsgathering process and to vet story opportunities efficiently. ‘Slack has facilitated our efforts to streamline the content creation process so we can continue to react rapidly to what’s happening in the world,’ he shared at the Slack Frontiers conference in 2020.
More broadly, ViacomCBS’s strategic shift toward more flexible ways of working underscores the importance of being agile, adaptable and collaborative. ‘We’re continuing to move quickly in our technology transformation,’ Wiser says, ‘and Slack has enabled us to bring everyone in our organisation along for this exciting journey.’
