Your employees talk to each other, whether you want them to or not. If your company is spread out (several offices in different places), or some of your people work remotely, you should think about a team chat.
You’ve probably noticed how many problems come from misunderstandings between departments, from things left unsaid, from a lack of transparency. Too little communication is the source of a great many problems in companies. No wonder Sam Carpenter says that communication is the one case where quantity matters more than quality.
A team chat that’s always on for every employee, with the option to create rooms for particular topics, is a good tool for getting a company talking, and for getting away from endless email threads.
Here’s an example from our own experience. A content manager who works remotely creates products on the website, our accountant adds them to the accounting system, and the system then updates the stock of those products on the website automatically. A problem comes up: some products appear on the site but never make it into the accounting system, so they can’t be sold. To sort out product problems quickly, we created a “New products” room in the chat and brought in the content manager, the accountant and the marketer who owns the process.
Besides the topic rooms, there’s a general chat for the whole company, where we mostly wish each other a good day and discuss candidates for the team. This kind of talk strengthens people’s sense of belonging and stands in for the physical “smoking spot on the stairs”.
By the way, have you noticed the difference? Here, the place for informal talk is the smoking spot. In English-speaking countries, it’s the water cooler. Which is healthier?
Of course, it’s best if you use some kind of intranet that already has this built in. Then again, in that case you wouldn’t be reading this article.
The simplest and, in my view, the worst option is a group chat in Skype. Simple, if your employees already talk to each other on Skype (a very common case). The worst, because Skype, like any messenger, tends to distract people from important work. People rarely keep their personal and work profiles apart, and so at some point in the middle of the working day you see an employee chatting with a classmate who “hasn’t written in ages”…
As I said, it’s best when the chat is built into a system your employees are already logged into during working hours. We use Podio.com. They have a free plan for teams of up to 5 users.
Excellent instant communication features (voice and video chat included), built into a full intranet. I recommend trying it. Your company’s intranet might start with the chat.
Western services aimed first of all at IT people. With paid and free plans, they look very appealing, they’re convenient, they make any part of the conversation easy to find (they keep the history), they support #tags and they have smartphone apps.
The main drawback is that it’s yet another separate app you have to roll out. In some cases that can be a problem.
To sum up, a team chat can be a useful tool for organizing work. Just don’t overdo it, or your employees’ suggestions for improvement will drown in a stream of links to “this crazy video where a guy jumps off the highest…” and the rest of the viral-content-site output.