Team chats only distract employees?

Find out:

• Wat are the challenges that come with a teamchat
• How you can overcome challenges with the right guidelines

Many of you are certainly skeptical about such a tool for internal, immediate communication. Perhaps employees are sharing only non-work-related content, and this is affecting productivity. If your employees intend to do something like this, they will do it one way or another – even without an internal team chat.

In our opinion, the challenge is completely different: It is the overwork of your employees, and this must be prevented. A team chat should make your everyday work easier and not have the opposite effect, such as:

• Permanent availability, even after work
• Expectation of immediacy
• Additional tool to all the others for external communication

It rings, peeps, flashes or vibrates. Sometimes several times an hour and all that while the salesclerk actually wants to and should concentrate fully on advising his customers.

However, there is a solution for everything that you can discuss together as a team:

5 guidelines for using a team chat

1. Set and communicate boundaries

Everyone in your team should feel like they can message anyone else easily at any time. If someone is not available, this must be communicated on the one hand and accepted and respected on the other. An “Away” or “Unavailable” status is a simple solution to this.

2. Different communication styles must be recognized and acknowledged

No two eggs are alike – what applies to personal exchange and the respective working methods also applies to chat preferences or styles. If everyone in the team recognizes and accepts that others write, answer or react differently, this is to everyone’s advantage.

3. Clarity through openness

If everyone is in the same boat, also when it comes to understanding your internal team chat, this strengthens security within the team. Communicate clearly from the beginning for which purposes the team chat can and should be used. This will ensure that conversations are more intentional and on-topic.

4. Non-work-related content strengthens your team and their productivity

Your team members know each other and have even developed friendships? Amazing! Then it also works better together. The agreement in the team chat to spend lunch together at the Asian restaurant around the corner is therefore not harmful, but beneficial for your team and its cooperation.

5. Use an integrated communication platform

Your team has already enough to do with your live chat, customer inquiries via social media and answering emails? To really make a difference in terms of team productivity you should consider an application that integrates all the platforms you use every day and enables functions that can be exceeds the pure sending and receiving messages so that you really achieve more as a team.

Don’t forget that new ways of doing things are not implemented perfectly overnight. By having open conversations within your team about working methods and communication styles and the right tool, local teams can benefit from the way other companies already practice communication in the workplace, even across multiple locations.

Curious?

We would be happy to inform you about our integrated team chat, which is also data protection compliant in accordance with the GDPR. Feel free to contact us directly at hallo@mpocket.io or visit our website www.mpocket.io. We look forward to hearing from you.

*For reasons of better legibility only the simultaneous use of male and female language forms is not used. All personal names apply to both genders.

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