R8| Friday, March 6, 2020 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
JOURNAL REPORT|WORKPLACE TECHNOLOGY
T
wo years ago, Lauren
Taylor, an assistant
principal at an elemen-
tary school in Tacoma,
Wash., wanted to make
the lives of her teachers
a bit easier. She had recently made
the shift to administration from
teaching and understood the grind of
managing the reading assessments
the school’s teachers regularly re-
cord for each of their students.
Her school had a license toMicro-
soft’s suite of productivity software
that includes a tool called Power
Apps, which allows users to build
their own custom apps. She began
fiddling around with it and created a
mobile app for compiling the reading
assessments, which had been re-
corded manually. And she didn’t stop
there.
“The app kept growing,” she says.
She tied it to a Microsoft data-visu-
alization tool to provide a detailed
picture of how well the students
progress over time.
Ms. Taylor’s journey into app
making highlights the growing de-
mand for custom apps and the grow-
ing market for tools that allow peo-
ple in any profession to make them.
Microsoft and a number of other
tech companies, such asSalesforce,
ServiceNowandSmartsheet, offer
so-called low-code or no-code tools,
which enable people with little to no
coding experience to develop their
own applications, usually with drag-
and-drop simplicity.Big growth expected
These tools have been around for
years, but demand for them has been
growing recently as companies in-
creasingly rely on technology to im-
prove their competitiveness, and
more professionals become aware of
how technology can boost their effi-
ciency and productivity. “There’s lots
of growth in demand to interact with
data and automate workflows,” says
Alex Zukin, an analyst at investment
bank RBC Capital Markets.
At the same time, there aren’t
enough mass-market apps to fit ev-
ery unique need popping up in the
workplace, and many companies are
finding they don’t have the resources
in-house to develop the software
they need from the ground up.“If you go to companies, the ma-
jority of them will say they have
difficulty filling developer jobs.
Even if they have a budget, they
can’t find employees” because of
the shortage of qualified candi-
dates, says Charles Lamanna, cor-
porate vice president of Microsoft’s
low-code application platform.That’s fueling the growth of simpli-
fied, do-it-yourself coding, he says.
“In the next five years, there will
be as many apps created as there
were in the last 40 years.”
The market for low-code tools is
projected to grow to $52 billion in
revenue by 2024 from an estimated
$6 billion in 2018, according toThese tools enable anybody
to create custom appsSo,YouGotSlackforYour
EmployeestoUse.
MakeSureYou’reReadyforIt.
BYCHARITYL.SCOTTWith its ability to facilitate conver-
sations across teams and time
zones, workplace-messaging plat-
form Slack seemed like an answered
prayer to the owners of OC Facial
Center, a day spa with locations in
California and the Philippines.
But when an upset employee
took to the platform to air some
grievances in a multimessage rant
on the all-staff channel, owners
Kate Hancock and Dan Robbins re-
alized they might not have been
clear about how they expected
Slack to be used.
They aren’t the only ones grap-
pling with how to get the most out
of the messaging tool, which func-
tions like a group chat for work-
place teams. Businesses often see
Slack as a magical solution for col-
laboration and rush to get it into
employees’ hands, says Brian
Kropp, chief of human-resources
research at Gartner Inc., yet
“we’ve never actually explained to
employees how you collaborate on
an electronic platform, which is
different from how you collaborate
in person.”
As a result, companies are con-
fronting a host of issues, including
Slack as a distraction, the difficulty
in keeping messages from creeping
into home life, and rude behavior.
Christina Kosmowski, vice presi-dent of global customer success at
Slack TechnologiesInc.,saysthe
platform began as an intuitive tool
that people could learn to use
without much instruction. Now,
business are “really starting to
take a more thoughtful approach,”
she says.
Many firms have had to estab-
lish clear rules and guidelines for
Slack’s use to get the most out of
the tool. Here are some areas of
focus.It’s a distraction
AtVested Group, a technology-con-
sulting firm in Plano, Texas,
founder Joel Patterson realized he
had a problem soon after his staff
started using Slack.
The constant flow of Slack mes-
sages and notifications were so dis-
tracting that some employees re-
fused to use it, while others had
trouble disengaging from it to focus
on work. Like social media, Slack
can become addicting, says Lucas
Miller, a productivity researcher
and lecturer at the University of
California, Berkeley’s Haas School of
Business.
To solve these problems, Vested
Group developed a dedicated train-
ing session on Slack best practices
and made it part of its new-em-
ployee orientation. The company
also created an etiquette guide that
explains, among other things, howand when to silence Slack notifica-
tions so users can focus on work.
As employees learned how to use
Slack, the resisters were able to see
its benefits, Mr. Patterson says.
Ms. Kosmowski says Slack actu-
ally can help reduce distractions
when companies take advantage of
all its features.Work-life imbalance
Because Slack’s default settings no-
tify users when they’ve received a
message, the platform can intrude
on workers’ downtime by making
them feel they must respond in-
stantly. This issue is exacerbated
when employees work different
shifts or live in different time zones.
Putting Slack notifications on
snooze can be a simple but impor-tant way to maintain a healthy
work-life balance, yet some firms
have found that many employees
won’t do this without prompting.Incubator for misbehavior
Slack’s informal atmosphere
also can be an incubator for misbe-
havior. “That line between where
the professional and personal blurs
starts to become really problem-
atic,” Mr. Kropp says.
But banning employees from
talking about anything besides
work can inhibit the increased ca-
maraderie that is one of Slack’s
main benefits.
One solution is to shape conver-
sations by creating public channels
for certain types of nonwork con-
versations. For example, VestedGroup set up channels centered on
coffee, food and celebrations.
In the case of OC Facial Center’s
disgruntled worker, a manager
spoke with the employee before de-
leting the inappropriate messages,
Mr. Robbins says. The company also
updated the employee handbook to
set clear expectations around how
people should use Slack.
The new guardrails haven’t pre-
vented employees from joking
around or sending funny memes.
“We still try to keep it fun, keep it
light,” Mr. Robbins says. “We call it
serious fun.”Ms. Scottis a reporter for The
Wall Street Journal in New York.
Email her at
[email protected]. FROM TOP: JOVELLE TAMAYO FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2); GIACOMO BAGNARACan’t
Code?
No
Problem
BYAARONTILLEYmarket-research and consulting
firm Prescient & Strategic Intelli-
gence.Weight loss
to quality control
Ms. Lauren continues to build more
apps after getting hooked on the
first one. After the reading-assess-
ment app, she created an app for
tracking the progress of students
with behavioral problems. It allows
supervisors to digitally compile the
students’ scores for achieving or not
achieving daily goals, instead of
writing the scores on paper. Ms.
Lauren says she has so many ideas
for apps, she keeps notes on what to
work on next. A third app, for taking
bus attendance, was created after
she asked the Twitter community
around Power Apps to help create it.
The need for custom apps is felt
across a variety of industries. Re-
becca Sackett was hired to do data
analysis atCustom Air Products &
ServicesInc., a commercial HVAC
company based in Houston, and the
company asked her to try out Power
Apps. Ms. Sackett had some experi-
ence managing databases for previ-
ous companies, but had no app-de-
velopment experience.
Since starting two years ago, she
has built 50 apps for the company—
for managing everything from re-
quests for paid time off to quality
control on the shop floor where the
HVAC systems are built. For a mo-
rale booster, she built an app em-
ployees can use to track progress to-
ward their weight-loss goals. Ms.
Sackett’s job is now focused solely
on managing the apps she has built
and creating new ones.
She says there’s a huge demand
for more application development at
her company, mostly related to im-
proving on processes that involve
lots of paperwork. Like Ms. Taylor,
Ms. Sackett can plug the data from
the apps into Microsoft’s data-visu-
alization tool.
Bigger companies also are using
app platforms instead of software
developers to meet their needs. JLL
Digital Solutions, a unit of real-es-
tate services firmJones Lang La-
Salle, has built custom apps using a
platform from Salesforce. The most
used app created this way is a reve-
nue-forecasting tool for the com-
pany’s technology and consulting
services, says Marshall King, senior
vice president of IT solutions at
Jones Lang LaSalle.
Five employees manage the apps.
“We don’t have any developers on
staff,” says Mr. King. “We steer clear
of any software development.”Mr. Tilleyis a Wall Street Journal
reporter in San Francisco.
He can be reached at
[email protected].Lauren Taylor
(above)usedthe
Power Apps tool
from Microsoft
to create
a number of
custom apps
for her
elementary school.Ashortage
ofsoftware
developers
hasfed
demandfor
DIYapps.