Some companies shut down during the winter holidays; others have one week of company-wide downtime so employees can recharge. At Slack, the workplace chat business owned by Salesforce, employees are taking a week off to earn “Ranger status.”
Beginning on Monday, Slack employees will be expected to set aside their regular work duties and to instead plug away at various modules on Salesforce’s Trailhead online learning platform, Fortune has learned.
The goal is for Slack’s employees to reach Trailhead’s Ranger level, a feat that requires roughly 40 hours on the learning platform, whose modules include topics like “Learn about the Fourth Industrial Revolution” and “Healthy Eating.”
A large percent of Slack’s roughly 3,000 staff have neglected to hit the target, according to sources inside the company. And since Salesforce provides Trailhead to other businesses as a way to “upskill” employees, some speculate that the slackers at Slack make for bad optics.
In a message to employees in mid-September, Slack CEO Lidiane Jones wrote that the one week shutdown, dubbed “Ranger Week,” is intended to give everyone “dedicated time to make a lot of progress towards the goal.”
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."
According to a screenshot viewed by Fortune, there are six ranks prior to achieving Ranger status, which requires 100 badges and 50,000 points. Each module varies in points earned towards this goal, for instance, there’s a “Fearless Teaming” module which teaches staff “how psychological safety and courage help create high-performing teams,” that earns a user 300 points and takes 45 minutes to complete, the screenshot revealed.
While some modules like The Fourth Industrial Revolution (which takes 20 minutes and earns 200 points) might seem odd, there are a lot of helpful ones, too. A source said there’s modules about Amazon AWS management and how to manage your Salesforce instances.
“We really are canceling all meetings next week to facilitate this heads-down time, even 1:1s,” Slack’s chief of staff to the CTO wrote to employees on Wednesday. “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!”
Some slack engineers are gaming the system with automated scripts
Not surprisingly, the Ranger status requirement has been met with some disdain from employees at Slack. Two sources told Fortune that many Slack engineers have found workarounds via scripts, code that can be quickly built to automate a task, to click through the modules for them.
“There’s no mandate [on] what modules people take so people are posting lists of the easiest ones and are speed running them,” a source said.
The same source added that staff speculated that this training is for CEO Marc Benioff's “ego” so he can claim to customers that a certain percentage of his staff are using Trailhead.
Still, the work stoppage is somewhat porous. Slack’s CTO noted that “deploys, on-call rotations, and interviews” will still happen as normal, and while no executive has used the word "mandatory," it's considered strongly encouraged.
“We know that this will take time away from projects, and may delay some launches; we understand, and encourage everyone to get to Ranger this week so that it isn't something you have to worry about later in the year,” Slack’s chief technology officer wrote to staff in September.
To encourage participation, each employee gets to expense $25 for lunch or coffee and the first team to reach 90% completion wins a $100 REI gift card.
As for overachievers who might want to spend the week going for the glory of earning All Star Ranger status— the highest possible level on Trailhead and requires a whopping 300,000 points—Slack’s managers did not mention any particular reward. But at least they can get back to work.
