Slack
- Christina Janzer is Slack's senior vice president of research and analytics.
- She said she's focused on helping workers cut their meeting time to two hours a day or less.
- Janzer's insights are part of Business Insider's year-end leadership series, "Looking Ahead 2024."
Slack's Christina Janzer wants to know what makes workers tick.
She's the senior vice president of research and analytics at Slack, the workplace-messaging company Salesforce acquired in 2021, and she leads its Workforce Lab.
"We want to understand how to make work better, and we want to improve the employee experience — and productivity," she told Business Insider.
Janzer, who has been at Slack for seven years, said one of the biggest challenges workers are facing is balancing their time, particularly around meetings. "We're focused on the quality of time that we're spending at work and how we can make sure people are structuring their day so they have the right ratio of meetings to focus time and they're taking breaks," she said.
Janzer's excited about the opportunities presented by generative AI. "Imagine if you can rely on a really nice summarization from AI where it summarizes the meeting for you: You have a five-minute recap that you can catch up on, and you save that whole hour of meeting time to then focus instead," she said.
"There's a huge opportunity for so much of routine, ongoing tasks to be replaced by AI," she added.
Janzer's insights are part of Business Insider's year-end leadership package, "Looking Ahead 2024," that digs into vision, strategy, and challenges across corporate America.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What are you looking forward to most in 2024?
While I don't think AI is going to solve everything, I'm really excited for the role that AI is going to play in making work better.
AI is really going to help people balance their workday. If you think about what people are excited about, it's AI playing a role in writing meeting notes and meeting recaps and summarization, writing assistance, the automation of workflow.
I think that's really going to help people clear their day and stop spending so much time on those more routine tasks that could just be automated. I think it's also going to give us an opportunity to think about productivity in a much more meaningful way.
If AI starts to take over the more mundane and repetitive tasks, then productivity is going to look a little bit different. Those routine tasks might have been how you measure your own productivity before, and if AI completely takes that over, it's going to be this opportunity for leaders to rethink how we measure productivity, which I think is really needed and really important.
What is your biggest concern for 2024?
We have a lot of data that suggests that people are not spending their time on the best things — that maybe they don't structure their workday in a way that's going to help them be most productive. They're spending too much time in meetings; they're not focusing enough.
Overall, people are just struggling with how to spend their time, and our recent data suggests they're not asking their managers for help.
We sort of see this feeling of constantly needing to catch up is hurting both employees and businesses. When we see that people are working after-hours — because they feel obligated to, because they have too much going on during their day and too many meetings to actually get all of their tasks done — to me, they're showing negative productivity. To me, this shows that there's a huge opportunity for managers to play a more proactive role in supporting their employees.
What's one thing you got right in 2023?
In 2023 we invested a lot in research to understand what's happening at work. One of the things that we found that I think is super exciting is that there's not a one-size-fits-all schedule.
But there's what we're calling this Goldilocks zone that's going to give employees the flexibility and the energy that they need in order to work their best. If we really want our time at work to be high-quality time, to be time well spent, we need that mixture of focus time, meeting time, and rest time. People need four hours of focus time in order to be productive, and that is a really important thing for us to pay attention to.
When you think about that — four hours for focus time — if you have more than two hours of meeting time, you're far more likely to feel like you don't have enough time to focus. The time that you spend in meetings is time away from focus.
Rest time is a really important component in your daily schedule, too. Productivity isn't linear — you're not going to be the same amount of productive at 8 a.m. that you are at 3 p.m. There's this idea of the afternoon slump, where from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. only one in four workers find that time to be actually productive. You have to really think about how you're structuring your day in order to maximize productivity.
What's one thing you got wrong in 2023?
We spend too much time in meetings. I think that there's a big opportunity for us to focus on solving the "meetings problem."
There are two issues that we're dealing with: just the sheer quantity of time that we're spending in meetings, and then also the quality of the meetings that we do attend.
What we've seen from our data is that the quality is generally quite low. People — employees and executives — feel like 50% of their meetings could be canceled with no consequence.
There's a big opportunity for us to take a hard look at the time that we are spending in meetings and have a higher bar for what does require that synchronous time together.