Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
IM best-practices in the workplace
Brian McCaffrey | Sep 28 2007
What is IM used for in the workplace? My office mates and I figured out this week that we have an IM client on our corporate workstations. Novices to the world of corporate IM, we don't really know what it's used for. I've used IM clients at home, of course, but never at work and we're all at a bit of a loss on how this would be useful, if at all. A quick session of searching 43f reveals that most of the discussion up until this point has been about managing the distractions of IM and managing your coworkers' expectations of your responses. But I'm wondering, what's IM used for in business? So far in my office, people have started chat sessions with entire work teams present online and left the session open all day. Team members will post questions or comments or requests to review edits on shared documents. In one of our groups, the director has moved some of his communication to the chat room, with the expectation that his team members will read this message during the next hour or two. Is this a typical use? How about one-on-one chats with colleagues? Tell me what IM looks like at your workplace. 46 Comments
POSTED IN:
 IM for me at workSubmitted by mistyp on September 29, 2007 - 5:29am.
I telecommute from my home in Iowa to my job in New Jersey. Some of my coworkers live in California, Canada, and even the Ukraine. The ones I use IM most extensively with are the coders in the Ukraine (so both sides of the IM are fairly tech-savvy). We use it for real-time status updates and communicating results of testing and questions about what results should be. We basically use it as a less-intrusive on-going phone call. I may go a week or two without an IM from anyone, and then a big testing phase will occur and I'll be IMing constantly throughout the day for several days. Usually if we don't get a response fairly quickly, we will also email the person, because we recognize that the technology can sometimes crap out. We are too wary of losing important communications to trust them solely to IM. I used to have a problem with personal IM being distracting at work, but I have since become more selective about who I'll talk to when, and it has become a non-issue. » POSTED IN:
|
|
| EXPLORE 43Folders | THE GOOD STUFF |
