Work culture can be hard to hard to crack at companies once they reach a certain scale, but tech has provided some interesting new ways to allow employees to bond.
Stripe and OpenAI, as it turns out, have Slack channels that are for employees with particular names. Stripe seems to have a dedicated Slack channel for employees named Matt. “Stripe has a slack channel called #matts for people named Matt,” said Matt Schulman, who works at Product Comms at Stripe. “Whenever a new Matt joins the company, all the old Matts welcome the new Matt,” he added.
The post garnered quite a few reactions on X, but as it turned out, Stripe wasn’t the only company with a Slack channel for people of a particular name. OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevil Weil said that at OpenAI, there was a dedicated Slack channel for people named Kevin. “We have a #kevins channel at OpenAI. We keep it flex so it’s both for kevins and the kevin-curious,” he said. Weil, himself a Kevin, was presumably a part of the channel.
This seems to be a simple work culture hack that can be effective at large companies. At a sufficiently large number of employees, companies will likely end up having many employees with the same first name. These employees will likely be distributed across seniority, job function, and roles, and a Slack channel that brings them all together could help create bonds which could be hard to replicate. People will initially join the channel as a joke, but then could end up discussing all sorts of ideas, which can not only boost morale but also help spark water-cooler conversations that span both seniority and job function. Work culture is anyway becoming hard to create with many companies now working remotely, and ideas like such Slack channels can help employees bond in ways that might seem unconventional, but can end up being quite effective in the long run.