I work remotely. As such, I rely on IM for a lot of business communication - it’s a stand-in for sticking your head in someone’s office and saying "Hey, can I ask you a quick question?
And, just like in real life, sometimes the “quick question” turns into a longer conversation that originally intended. And that’s OK - I find IM a perfectly good method for communicating even somewhat complex concepts. Now, at some point, it makes more sense to pick up the phone, but for me, that’s reserved for either really complex questions, or things that involve a lot of opinions and back-and-forth.
For programming questions, I almost prefer IM, because you can cut and paste actual code. The other nice thing about IM is that you get a written archive of the conversation you can go back to for reference if needed.
So far, most people I work with seem to feel the same way, all except one person. She really, really despises IM, and doesn’t keep it a secret. Everything but the most simple yes/no questions gets a phone call instead of an IM. If I initiate the IM with her (which I do sometimes because it’s just second nature for me), chances are in the first minute or two she’ll say something like “this is a pain, let me give you a call.” I like her, so it’s not a big deal to hop on the phone, but sometimes I gotta wonder what the big deal is - she maintains IM is a crappy way of communication, and she feels it’s quicker and less interruptive to hop on the phone. I’m sure it’s that way for her, but hell, for me, it’s WAY less interruptive to have an IM conversation than a phone conversation.
So, for those of you who use IM for work (casual conversation is different) what do you think? Is IM a good business communication tool, or does it suck? Would you rather call someone/be called then be pinged with an IM?
Because I have used IM for so long for personal, social messaging, it almost seems weird to use it in a business context. A lot of my coworkers do, and I don’t have anything against it, but it never occurs to me.
The one downside I have noticed is that it takes more effort to get feedback. If you ask me a question, and I interpret it somewhat differently than what you were asking, on the phone you could (politely) interject and let me know we’re talking about two different things. In IM, I’ve already put some effort into answering the question before you have time to respond and say “oh no, I meant something slightly different!”
We use IM all the time - in fact we’re required to have it active while we are working. A few of our coworkers who are a tad scared of IM e-mail instead, and I have a few coworkers who dislike IM as they need to respond in a decent timeframe (it’s ridiculously easy to make you appear always online, versus it flipping to Away after 5 minutes).
We team share phones, and when I am not on phones, I have it shut down (Cisco SmartPhone system), so a coworker could try to call, but I wouldn’t know for a few days.
While I love IM and use it extensively, there is a point at which you need to actually walk over to the person’s desk or pick up the phone.
For emails, if I can’t type my explanation in ten minutes or less, chances are I should call/pop in, I haven’t really figured out what the similar analogy is for IM.
If it’s a choice between a phone call and IM, I generally prefer IM. Given that I’m often involved in technical discussions with people originally from India, or China, or the Middle East, or Russia, sometimes all at once, it’s often the best way to understand everyone.
However, as more people become comfortable in using it, I am finding more people using it in place of email, which can be very annoying, as IMs are more interrupting. Particularly annoying are the people who previously blasted everyone in the group with an email thread instead of escalating to whichever one person should be helping them now just go an put everyone in the group into an IM conference.
Right tool for the right job. For simple questions, it’s good. As a supplement to a concall, especially with co-workers that speak English as a second language, it’s a GREAT tool. While in otherwise busy meetings, its also good.
But it isn’t the right tool for everything. Nothing beats going and getting real face time. If it’s complex, pick up the phone.
You sort of sound like the woman I’m talking about - your arguments about “nothing beats going and getting real face time” and “if it’s complex, pick up the phone” sound like what she says.
I find that I (and most people I deal with) find IM the right tool for everything but the most complex of conversations. And one of the very, very best things about working remotely IMO is that nobody can barge into my office to get “face time” because they find that more convenient for them than sitting down and writing a concise and complete email. In other words, they’d rather come hem and haw in my office and make me listen to them figure out their own question than do it on their own time and let me work.
IM is great for simple Q&A. But for any complex conversation, it’s vastly too slow. If I ask a significat question, you have to spend 3 or 4 paragraphs to explain the answer, or explain how what I asked demonstrates that I didn’t really understand what I should have been asking, and so which of these 3 sub-questions am I really asking?, etc. Meanwhile the other party is just sitting there, totally interrupted and unable to work on whatever they were doing before the IM popped up.
The instant the A is more than “Yes”, “No”, or “Sometime tomorrow afternoon”, it’s far better to switch to voice where you can negotiate out whatever the topic is quickly & efficiently. If you do need to transfer any writing, like a url, filename, or some code, use the IM channel as an adjunct to the voice call.
To me IM gives the illusion of productivity, but not the reality. I feel real busy while composing & typing a response. But then I realize I could have said it in 1/4th the time it took to type it. Viewed another way, we could have completed 3 or 4 cycles of voice back & forth to home in on the real topic in the same time it took for me to half-answer the wrong question.
Naturally, if you’re dealing with somebody whose phone calls demand 5 minutes of BSing before and after the meat is delivered, that’s a different story. For them, IM may be an effective way to eliminate the social BS & cut to the chase.
It doesn’t work at all for me. I just cannot have a conversation in which meaningful information is exchanged through IM. I have similar problems with email, but email is used more frequently to share actual documents, which is O.K. I find that I misinterpret or just plain don’t understand about 50% of everything said in an IM. Maybe it’s that I somehow use non-verbal cues or tone of voice to communicate with other people, but on IM I feel like I’m speaking in a foreign language that I don’t quite understand.
I have had to learn to live with the fact that people frequently respond to my phone calls by sending me an email, which usually doesn’t exactly answer the question, leaves me with additional questions, or is open to multiple interpretations, but it makes me very anxious and irritated. If you want to make IM your primary means of communication, I will do my best to accommodate, but I hope that people will have some compassion and understanding for those of us who would prefer to just discuss things over the phone.
I don’t like to use IM in my personal life, for obvious reasons, but at one point my parents were on AOL and using it, and I had a long conversation with my Dad about an experience he had had. When I later mentioned it to him on the phone, he said, “That wasn’t me, that was your Mom.” I had in fact had about a 15 minute IM conversation with my Mom, thinking the whole time that she was my Dad. If I can’t even tell my parents apart on IM, imagine the difficulty I have interpreting work issues.
This is another thing my co-worker says, and I believe she does it as well.
I don’t just sit there unable to work while I wait for people to answer. I read the IM, respond to it, and go back to work. If the person takes 10 minutes to type their answer, fine, I’ll work for ten minutes. And I’m happy doing it.
I guess that’s part of the reason why I find IM more productive and easier to deal with than the phone. On the phone, you’re stuck listening while someone talks through their issue. On IM, I can do something else while they construct a coherent sentence. IM wins, for me at least.
But I’m finding out from this thread that there’s a LOT of people out there like my coworker. It’s kind of eerie; you all say the same thing. I’m thinking maybe it’s a difference in communication styles; some people do better by hearing, some by reading. Or something. Sounds like a good grad school thesis for an aspiring communications major.
What I find is that nobody in my company can answer the question I actually asked. Nor ask an unambiguous question which has a single valid answer.
As a result, every communication involves several rounds of refining the mutual understanding until they can then ask a meaningful question or supply the meaningful answer I seek.
And trying to do this process via IM or email is hopelessly inefficient.
I do find that for less-techical people I can provide any random answer, even one which is grammatically, and they accept it just fine. It gets them out of my hair, but it doesn’t actually advance the goals of the business.
As to doing something else while IMing …
if I’m writing code and you send me a 2-sentence question I can stop, then spend 2 minutes writing back a 4-sentence request for clarification. But I can’t go back to coding during the 1-2 minutes it takes you to digest my replly & counter reply. I won’t get my mental state reloaded before you interrupt me again.
Sure, If I was just plowing through read-and-pitch emails I can deal with 1 or more IM streams more or less at the same time. But very little of my office workday is anything other than intense concentration. Once you interrupt me I’m all done doing anything else useful until you’re 100% gone and staying gone.
I love IM, but it definitely makes a difference how fast your network is and how fast you and your co-workers can type.
I have a crappy memory and I have to take notes about freaking everything, so even if I’m face to face or on the phone, I’m usually typing notes. With IM I can c&p the exchange and use that for my notes.
That said, having 27 unique chat windows active (my personal record) is . . . distracting.
Here may be a social point which drives some of the rest of our differences.
In my company, an IM is treated as a fully real-time communication. Once we get past the “Got time for a Q?” “Yep. ask away.” handshake, we all expect a drop everything & respond right now type of response. It is NOT socially acceptable to finish doing something else & reply in 10 minutes. And once a reply goes out, it’s expected that the recipient read, act, & counter-reply immediately. If I sent the first reply & I next heard back 10 minutes later with their next round I’d be pissed.
The good news is this social contract keeps each IM session short in elapsed time. The bad news is it ensures each session completely monopolizes your time while it’s running. Or at least ensures you can’t do anything else complicated during an IM session.
I would suggest you lighten up a bit. Comes across as “you dinosaur.” People are wired differently and communicate in different ways. I find it distracting and inefficient to have to drop whatever I’m doing to deal with IMs that start getting complex. It may work best for you to operate in a tweat world but not necessarily for everyone else
I lived and worked remotely for a decade in a really inconvenient timezone. IM was quite useful for several things. Often, “did you see my email and can you reply?” because it’s a lot more complex than an IM. Especially to put in context and background. And I used IM a lot more working remotely and isolated like that because it was more efficient for me. Could care less about my cow-orkers because I needed to get my job done.
Now that I’m at the global HQ, I find it much more efficient and effective for me to go see people in person. YMMV. Again the right tool for the job rather than a one sized fits all approach for me.
I used to hate IM, But as IT organizations(and the people in it) learned to use it well it has become an indispensable tool.
For example, I was an emergency lead on a major project that was being released last Friday. There were some um …issues… with things. I had probably 10 IM conversations going at once, and 10 more one offs while debugging and rewriting code. Trying to get the code from the programmer, the unit test results from the tester, the original requirements from the analyst, The business owner to understand why the original requirements were shitty and unworkable and to sign off on a new Architecture diagram, keeping the project manager from having a coronary, trying to keep my director from doing anything at all, finding a competent system tester who could under what the problem was and how to test my change while begging, cajoling, bargaining and threatening the 16 or so sequential change control approvals to demote, substitute, and re-promote the release code “right now”.
Short of growing 8 more heads for 7 more headsets, or making a 120 hour day to wait for emails to pass, it is simply not possible to do my job by deadline without IM anymore.
ETA forgot to add talking to the DBA and SYS Admin doing the actual work of preparing for the release.
What happens is people call you and keep you on the phone for half an hour talking about random shit when all you needed to do is spend a couple minutes on an email or IM. It doesn’t work any faster when you call. In fact, when you call and ask me about something, you are interrupting what I’m doing at the moment, so I have to shift over to what you’re asking me, and then I have to figure out what your problem is, which is annoying over the phone. It puts me on the spot. If it takes me 10 minutes to figure out what the issue is, we’ve both been sitting on the phone, silent, and I feel like there’s a timer on me like in a fast food drive-thru.
If you had emailed or IMed me, I could take 5 minutes to finish my current task, then devote myself to your request. So while I’m spending 15 minutes investigating an answer, you also have 15 minutes to work on your other work instead of dead space on the phone.
I do website updates and we get phone calls where you sit on the phone for 45 minutes while people meander through their thoughts and waste both our time when you could have emailed me a bullet list of your updates in 3 minutes.
I also hate the phone because you’re jumping the queue. Unless it’s an emergency (your website is down or your lawyers told you to change something ASAP) send an email and get in line, you’re not more important than the person whose email request I was doing before you called trying to get me to do something right away.
I like IM too. I prefer to work asynchronously and IM and email lets me do things in the order I prefer. It works really well with colleagues in India. It takes me a few minutes of listening to an accent to get tuned in and completely understand them. With IM there’s no delay in understanding. You don’t have to respond to an IM immediately, just wait til you’re ready before sending the SYN, ACK.
If I need to discuss an issue with you, hash out different approaches, or understand something that I have little experience with, I find a phone call more productive. Of course, I usually precede the call with an IM asking if you’re free and can discuss issue X with me.
If I have a task that will require significant time to finish, or requires an “official” reply, or requires files to be distributed, email is better.
Generally, IMs aren’t a “drop everything” deal, unless it’s from your boss or some other executive type. I also find it difficult to go back to my work if I’m going to be interrupted again in 2 minutes.