Instant messaging (IM) in the workplace has been around for a while. The consumerisation of technology, and popularity of social media and messaging apps, have already filtered into the workplace and changed work interactions.
Organisations have tried to harness messaging in different ways, back in 2011 Thierry Breton - the CEO of French IT company, Atos, caused a huge stir by announcing his plan to ban all internal emails.
Such a ban is difficult to enact for even the smallest of businesses, but Atos employs over 70,000 employees, across 42 countries. So how did Breton plan to keep employees communicating without internal emails?
Why use internal Instant Messaging
Breton’s plan was to reduce the amount of clutter in the workplace, as he saw the trend of excessive emailing as a sort of digital pollution. Breton said, “...we are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives.”
It wasn’t just the clutter, Breton had also started to notice that many of the younger people Atos employed were more comfortable using messaging apps. As for upper management, Breton noted that they were spending up to twenty hours a week on emails. When you consider that France has a 35 hour work week, it all adds up to a lot of lost time.
Of course, email is still an essential tool for every business. It’s fantastic for sending and receiving files, and few companies could function without external emails. However, data shows that email use is beginning to wane (especially in younger users) in favour of instant messaging. So should your company incorporate instant messaging into your unified communications plan?
Benefits of Instant Messaging
1. Real Time Responses
One of the biggest benefits of instant messages is that they elicit a swift response. This is in part due to their short nature, which encourages the receiver to act swiftly upon the message request.
2. Precise Targeting
Unlike emails, which are often sent to a large group of people, instant messages are directed at specific employees with specific requests. This encourages workers to ask the right questions from the right people and assists with decreasing the amount of needless emails in your employee’s inboxes.
3. Boost Productivity
Instant messages are written in the same format as an SMS, so you aren’t socially expected to use formal greetings or sign offs, which makes instant messages quicker to write and quicker to read – especially for quick questions, quick decisions, the smaller communication points that end up cluttering email inboxes. This gives your employees more time to focus on the task at hand, and helps to boost productivity.
If your employees are already using ‘informal’ or consumer-grade instant messaging at work, or you are considering introducing instant messaging into your unified communications plan, then talk to imei. imei UCaaS has a strong and secure instant messaging feature integrated into the overall platform. Not only does this keep your communications systems streamlined and secured, but it also reduces overall costs by negating the need for third party applications and licenses. To help your business get the most out of imei UCaaS, we’ll also provide thorough, on-site training to ensure that all of your employees are comfortable incorporating instant messaging into the way they work.
To find out more about imei UCaaS, just head to our product page, submit an online enquiry, or call us on 1300 65 77 99.
