Update on precautions for Slack employees from Slack SVP of People Robby Kwok

On March 7, 2020, we communicated additional changes to the way our employees will work. These decisions continue to be made out of an abundance of caution, and are informed by and exceed recommendations from local health authorities and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These decisions do not reflect any new developments related to potential employee exposure.

The changes we announced today are:

• Strongly encouraging all employees to work from home through the end of March.
• Not allowing visitors at our offices without VP approval.
• Rescheduling or cancelling all office events.
• Converting all on-site interviews to video conference interviews.

As previously communicated to employees:

• We have closed our Tokyo and Osaka offices until further notice, and are asking employees to work from home instead.
• Slack will not permit business travel to/from Level 2 and 3 countries, and will limit business travel to/from Level 1 and all other countries to essential trips.

Our employees are safe and are able to continue working as normal—wherever they are. We are also executing against our pre-established business continuity and pandemic plans. While no systems can perfectly anticipate every contingency, we are confident in our product’s technical architecture and its ability to handle increased volume and load. For information about Slack’s business continuity plans, see this blog post.

This is an update to a statement released on March 5.