Salesforce-owned Slack is sunsetting Future Forum, a consortium that conducted quarterly surveys of 10,000 office workers globally on flexible and remote work, and repeatedly found it was popular with most workers. Among other things, it found that flexible work has a positive impact on productivity, fosters trust between employees and employers, and decreases employee turnover. This comes amid Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s push for workers to return to the office.
On Friday, the executive leader of the Future Forum, Brian Elliot, wrote “there’s no easy way to say this” to employees in Slack’s internal #friends-of-future-forum channel, disclosing that the company planned to shut down the research group at the end of March, according to screenshots of the message seen by Fortune. He did not cite a reason for the closure, and a Slack spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.
