Small team collaboration favorite Slack is seeking a solution to its excessive outages, but in the meantime, your small business needs a contingency plan.
Slack is one of the leading collaboration platforms among small businesses.
Thousands are using Slack to connect teams in the same building or around the world on projects big and small. But there’s a problem. Slack tends to stop working quite a bit.
In fact, according to a recent report, Slack saw outages a total of 40 days in 2017. And there were 51 other days when users reported Slack not working to its full potential.
A Fix for Slack Downtime Ahead?
Now, Slack is looking to build a team of engineers to tackle the software’s outage problems. The goal is to address problems within Slack before they become widespread and cause a total fail.
This should be welcome news for small businesses that rely on Slack daily.
Software problems can be a major productivity drag. That’s something a small business can ill afford. Not only is work not getting done but employees are getting paid while they wait for the system to get back up and running.
When Slack goes down, people tend to tweet about it (so you know nothing is getting done). A small business could lose as many as 545 labor hours annually on IT downtime. And that’s for all tech problems. That could be as much as $1.5 million, according to recent research.
Millions of people use Slack daily for all types of businesses and projects. It’s clearly got some benefits.
But eventually, small businesses, especially, will begin to notice the downtime and the lost productivity. With 40 days down last year, it’s likely many businesses have already noticed.
While Slack is working on a backup plan, it may be a good time for your small business to work on its technology backup plans. It could mean switching to another collaboration platform. Or it could just mean adding other services that help you stay connected if an important tool like Slack suffers another outage.
Don’t forget about the lost labor costs, too. A plan for what employees should do during Slack downtime should be part of your strategy.
Image: Small Business Trends