Slack Will Halt Normal Business Hours Next Week For Worker Boot Camp Amid ‘Slacking’ Concerns 

Salesforce-owned work chat platform Slack will pause regular business operations next week. Thousands of workers are advised to complete an educational boot camp about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and learn more about Amazon AWS for upskilling purposes amid internal chatter by management that some employees are ‘slacking.’

Fortune spoke with a company insider who said a majority of the 3,000 employees had fallen behind on internal training and will spend next week in the company’s Trailhead online learning platform to learn 40 hours of topics like “Learn about the Fourth Industrial Revolution” and “Healthy Eating.

The boot camp for slackers is a move by the company to “upskill” employees. Fortune speculates that lazy employees are terrible optics for the company. 

In a memo from mid-September, Slack’s CEO Lidiane Jones informed employees about the one-week boot camp called “Ranger Week.” 

Jones wrote in her message that the product development engineering (PDE), customer experience (CE), Biz Ops, and communication departments are expected to participate in Ranger Week. “It’s important that we all reach Ranger status this year, and I want to ensure that everyone has focus time to upskill on Trailhead,” Jones wrote in the message to staff. “I know this will disrupt and slow V2MOM progress for many of us – we are making this a priority now so we can quickly get back to work on our roadmaps,” she said, referring to the company’s annual forward-looking strategy planning document which stands for vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measures.

“Salesforce is committed to the ongoing learning and development of its employees and the broader talent ecosystem, especially with the rapid acceleration of generative AI,” a Slack spokesperson wrote in an email to Fortune. “This year, the entire company is working to reach Ranger status on Trailhead, Salesforce’s free online learning program, that empowers anyone to upskill in areas relevant to their roles and career goals. Slack regularly experiments with ways to give its employees time to focus on company and team priorities, like reaching Ranger status.” -Fortune

 Besides learning about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, employees will be provided with other topics, including Amazon AWS management. 

Slack’s chief of staff to the CTO told employees this week:

“We really are canceling all meetings next week to facilitate this heads-down time, even 1:1s.

“We don’t know yet what will happen to people who haven’t hit Ranger by Jan. 31. At a minimum, it will make Slack look bad compared to the other clouds. Please do use the time next week to make as much progress as you can!”

We all know the likely outcome if employees don’t complete the boot camp: layoffs.