I worked for a news agency where we used IM as an intercom. Not so faceciously I can say its practical purpose was to keep us from getting into the zone EVER.

What is worse, endless procrastination at home or endless interruptions in an office setting?

In a lot of companies I talk to — at least within teams — IM is the new email.

This is a double-edged sword for sure, since IM, obviously demands immediate attention in a way that typical email may/should not. A part of me agrees it’s smart to start treating email more as the way to distribute non-time-sensitive information that people can then filter however they want — while IM essentially assumes the role a phone might have had up through even the early 90s.

One tip I’ve picked up from my Google friends? Consider using your IM status/away message to indicate your preferred mode of contact and/or level of interrupt-ability. EG:

• “Coding — would prefer email”
• “Call if it’s an emergency”
• “Only here for ‘Project Foo’ questions”
• “Build day - please catch me tomorrow or Monday”

Anyhow, like all this stuff, it comes down to how your team likes to work. But I’m intrigued by the idea that a responsible, respectful group of folks could (could) craft IM into a sustainable way to efficiently escalate the need for quick blasts of attention.

I work in a helpdesk/customer service environment. IM is often used for quick questions. “Are you working on this outage?” It is also very handy when you are screening calls.. You can let somebody know who you are transfering to them so that they can decide if they want to pick up this particular sales guy or not.

I often ask somebody for input… “If you get a miniute can you look at case 11242 for me and give me a suggestion?” This doesn’t interrupt them, but allows them to ask questions without going back and forth with a bunch of emails.

I’m in an academic environment, and we use IM for a wide range of communication — everything from extensive collaboration meetings (which, oddly enough, are usually conducted one-on-one in sequence rather than in chat rooms) to quick questions to code copying/pasting to notification of new papers and information… In fact, because we do quite a bit of coding in the workplace, I’ve discovered that even in our cube group we tend to communicate about academic and professional topics more often through IM than through personal interaction.

Typing that out, it sounds a little sad. But - it works.

Firstly, you have to be disciplined about setting your busy, on phone or in meeting status as I use this to control people’s access and allow me some time to do my job and cut down on the distractions.

The best uses I have for it are :

• If you open a group chat during an online presentation from a 3rd party them you can share comments and thoughts as the presentation as it goes along. I have found that this helps us get the most out of the presentations.

• To have 1to1 or 1to2 chats about a piece of information or to check someone has done something so rather than sending an email or picking up the phone I will just IM them to say have you done this or when will you be able to get this to me.

Another best practice is only contact people when they show as available.

Normally have it up and running for quick questions with a couple of members of the team I work in.

The nuisance comes in when people inevitably use it inappropriately:

• succession of questions blinking away instead of picking up the phone and calling

• using it to bypass the normal processes for handling a request, because their request is obviously far more important than everyone else….

The people who are guilty of doing this are generally those who abuse email etiquette anyway.

I just switched jobs, from an environment that used IM to one that doesn’t. I have to say that I am much happier without the constant interruptions.

In my previous position, IM was abused like crazy: “Did you get my email?” It was also used as a pager system, which was the most aggravating, “Can you come down here?”

After the first couple of weeks of this and getting burned on a major project, those requests to “come on down…” turned into anxiety inducing needle-like pains. They were always short, never descriptive of what I would be coming down for, thus I never knew if I was going to be scolded or if it was just to discuss a great idea.

I tried using a variety of away messages to explain that I shouldn’t be disturbed, but that was just like telling people to not disturb me, but leaving my office door open.

In my new job, I have a much smaller IM list, which excludes the management, making it much more useful for the quick questions, etc.

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.

I work in a large global company and Instant Messaging is a great productivity tool for us. The last time I heard numbers a couple of years ago we were over 250.000 users.

In the daily worklife everybody uses it when behind their laptop. We use Sametime, our IM tool, to ping colleagues around the world for quick questions, sometimes longer questions and for coordination of (customer) conference calls.

I don’t know the numbers, but am quite sure the global use of Sametime has a possitive business case, saving us a lot of money on telecom cost.

As for productivity? We can’t live without it!

I am a Messaging Consultant, having worked with different messaging systems I have seen IM come a long way and know it has a long way to go. IM in the workplace can be a boost to productivity and it can be the bane to the workplace as well. I have seen it abused and misused, I have seen it used for valid work communication and I have seen it as a distraction to workers.

It really depends on each individual on how they use it. With regard to a corporate IM program many companies, educational institutions and government entities use it for a select few while the vast majority of other users rely on the public IM such as AIM, MSN, Yahoo and GMail to name just a few.

Users need to recognize that many IM’s do NOT have sufficient security to warrent using it for confidential information and I have seen many requests from lawyers, police and the FBI asking for the transcripts and archives of not only email but now IM conversations. Armed with the proper warrant they get what they want and sometimes more if the IM network servers are confiscated.

Personally I have used it for quick conversations with fellow employees, finding out if they truly are there (some do change their status) and asking for information to be sent to me. The programs I have installed and used in a corporate setting are secure in that the information is sent encrypted, however, remember that many persons do not use a screen saver nor do they lock their computers, so information while sent encrypted is very visible to passer-bys or visitors to your office.

Usually in educational settings corporate IM is NOT used by students, unless they are student workers. I regularly use GMail for talking to friends around the world by means of my headset, others use Skype or other programs. For catching up with friends quickly it can be great to have, but remember that your employer does not pay you for speaking to friends and relatives and doing so may cost you your job.

It’s like personal email, use only email programs at work that do not download a copy of the email to your work computer, if it is downloaded it is now the property of your company since it resides on their computer. Be careful, be watchful, and be aware of proper etiquette when using either IM or email.

If your work offers an IM program, inquire as to the rules for use, ask if it is for confidential information use as well. Once you have found out what the guidelines are - adhere to them.

I use IM both at home and work.

It is ideal to set your IM status, e.g. “Away” to tell people you are either not on the keyboard or not readily available for chat.

If you use Windows Live Messenger and got Messenger Plus! Live (which is an add-on), you can use Plus! to autorespond to people based on your IM status.

Let it do all the work for you, thus saving you time to do other things.

For “Away” status, I set the autoresponder to tell people that “I am off the computer, please leave a message if it is important and I will get back to you” - or to that effect.

Cheers

You didn’t ask about education, but that’s my business. As a college professor, I’ve been using IM for office hours for years and years — maybe around ten? About two years ago I had to add a second screen name just for office hours, and that’s what I put on my syllabus. I probably get five times as many students seeking help via IM than coming to my posted office hours, which is good. (The problem in academia is getting students to seek help or interact informally with faculty.)

I manage it by having a few posted “walk in” hours and doing random hours when I am doing low-attention tasks. It is a lovely thing to be able to help several students at once and yet still give them individual attention.

We use IM as well as a shared “dumping ground” for collaboration between several people scattered all over the world. No more emails with large attachments or saving them and remembering where you saved them to. They get dumped in a centralized location with privileged access. Nothing local, that is, I don’t IM with people in the same building. Nor is it on all the time for interruptions.

Email has supplanted IM as the “instant messaging” of choice at my company, due to the BlackBerry Plague (department policy is that all messages must be returned by the end of day, and as soon as possible during the day). IT disabled Messenger about a year ago.

While it was working, the big bonus was to communicate between the dispatch and sales desk - both departments that tend to spend a lot of time on the phone, so “is this ready?” messages saved having to hike across the building.

It also helped that (a) the group was small and (b) it was used for a specific need.

IRC, more than IM, is for me the norm. You go to a chatroom and talk in groups and you have a pretty good log of the conversation. A mutation of IRC is called AltME (altme.com), which lets you comfortably work in IRC style chatrooms, show large amounts of code or text in a single line, create closed and secure chatrooms, export chat logs as HTML and search your logs. It looks like IRC and acts a bit like it, but it handles as much information as a plain text mail and is as fast as IM. It lets you use separate chatrooms for separate topics. As a result, I have about 100 different chatrooms here for different topics. It’s persistent: Log off and log on a few days later and see where the conversation has gone since and who has messaged you. It’s not yet a fully fledged groupware system, but the chatting part is awesome for me. This is my primary communications form and it works solidly for me and the developers I communicate with. I’ve been using it since 2003. As a funny side effect, I practically never use email for conversations, only for site registrations, etc.

But it really is only useful for increasing productivity, if you talk to people in the other end, who are used to using it. It takes two skilled IM’ers to make a good conversation or IM session.

I use these rules:

Sender:

1. Talk when you have something important to say that will bring a conversation forward. At any other time, don’t say anything.
2. Don’t. Speak. One. Word. At a time. To fill. The chatlog. With unnecessary. Crap.
3. Don’t expect an answer immediately. Say and forget. Return later to check up the conversation progress. Who cares if the receiver is at his/her desk now? You’ll likely get a response later. I think this is one of the reasons people get stressed up over IM, because they don’t use it right.
4. If you really, really want a response now, call them or arrange a 30-60 minute chat session within a few hours. Make sure you don’t need a response right now, so this won’t be an issue. Ask your question in good time, rather than when you must have an answer right now. This also helps eliminating the “oh-crap-I-forgot-to-ask” scenario and it helps the receiver to quietly place a Todo based on that question into his/her GTD system. Remember that you are stressing the receiver and potentially pulling them out of their concentration.

Receiver:

1. Don’t answer immediately if you don’t want to. Instant messaging does not mean Instant Response and drop-whatever-you’re-doing. Phones are made for that kind of nonsense.
2. Don’t let your client disturb you with noises and blinking and jumping graphics. Turn that crap off. If you can’t, find a different client. Check your client manually along when checking your email.

Generally:

1. Use a persistent chat system that does not require the other end to be online.
2. You can still chat, even if a full day or several days may be required for a response. It’s surprisingly easy to maintain a simple conversation thread over a few days. Don’t get stressed over it. Relax. Information is not lost with good, persistent chat systems.
3. Multitask. Be asynchronous. I don’t find it difficult to quietly and calmly check up on 15-20 conversation threads. Do you? I’m only focusing on a conversation, when I read it.

For me, phone conversations are forbidden with developers and only allowed with friends and family, who can’t tell text messaging from a tire iron. Some people around me hate me for that, but this has given me freedom to better focus on correct and accurate communication with many different people. I’ve had too many bad work experiences of miscommunication, misunderstandings and having to repeat information 5-10 times due to something as simple as a bad phone connection or the urge to smalltalk or change topic, or simply because the guy in the other end informs me of something, when I’m not mentally ready to listen. Text messaging allows me to listen to music as well. That’s a good thing. :-)

Sorry for the long post. Just wanted to contribute to a better IM environment.

I’m an administrative assistant at a somewhat large corporation. (20K-30K-ish employees) We use a Lotus product, Sametime for IM. It’s very basic, no smileys, no pictures, just text. We’re expected to have it on when we’re in the office. We have three settings, available, away, and do not disturb. We can change the message for those but no one reads them. We use it for quick questions or tasks or to collaborate with something quickly. And for social purposes. Which we’re officially not supposed to do, excesively, but everyone does. The usual, “Going to lunch?” or “Wanna get coffee” etc. I’ll be honest I usually chat with a good friend of mine all day.

It’s good because we’re increasingly spread out. People are in different office across the country and world, people work from home, and now folks can have it on a Blackberry too. It’s nice to be able to ask quick questions. I have folks on their Crackberries ask me what room they are in for X meeting, etc.

It’s bad because like everyone else said, it’s a distraction. But honestly if I really do not want to be distracted, I put myself on DND. That way nothing is getting through. Basically means “Call or email me if you REALLY need something.” Some folks have taken to putting themselves on away when they really aren’t. I guess it cuts down on the IMs but then even folks who don’t do that get IMs when they are away because others assume we’re really their. If I’m on away, it’s for a reason, don’t expect a quick answer at noon, I’m at lunch. I’ve told the folks I support that I prefer not to get work requests via Sametime. A quick request or very time sensitive one is fine. IMing me and saying “My flight got changed to NOW can you change my hotel and get me a limo immediately” is fine but “I’m going to the Texas office next week can you do my travel arrangements” is not. And the simple reason is CYA. I’ve had folks IM me with something, I do it, then they claim they asked me to do something different. Our chats are not automatically logged on our PCs. IS probably has them somewhere but they aren’t readily available for disputes like that. So if someone asks me to do a task like that via Sametime I ask them to please email it to me instead.

Other bad things include our help desk. Most of them are “off shored” and will often IM about a ticket. Which is fine except you’d think they were all 14 years old. Using IM/Txt chat at home is fine but in a business environment, it’s not cool. I’m not THAT old but I still shouldn’t be given a headache trying to decipher what they’re saying. The regular language barrier is difficult enough.

Honestly I wish the powers would be would come up with a “Sametime Best Practices” document that everyone is expected to adhere to. It would make my life a lot easier.

IM for me:

1. share application or share desktop:
   quickly review data with people.
2. share edits of documents via copy / paste.
3. quick Q and A sessions.
4. CAN BE A HUGE DISTRACTION…

We use it for:

1) transfer of files, sometimes we have network problems and cannot access files/ folders but for some reason, they can transfer through the messenger.

2) at times some one will be working from home/ another place (business trip)

3) we have potential clients in Europe (I work for a football/ soccer club) so we need to discuss issues with coaches/ scouts etc.

That being said, I personally have two IM clients, one personal, which I rarely open during the day, and one for work.

I work in a phone sales environment. This means that when I’m not working on perfecting my golf swing (apparently), I’m on the phone with customers - mainly IT professionals - discussing new equipment they need in their datacenters. This means it’s next to impossible for a coworker to reach me by phone or vice versa.

Hence, IM. Most of the time it’s an extremely useful communication tool, like when we have multiple people from a sales team across several sites on a conference call with the IT Director and CFO of a business client. It’s better to pass along tidbits like “the CFO’s name is Bill” or “here’s quote XXX for the proposal” over IM than rudely interrupt the customer saying it out loud.

There are, of course, times when I want to put a blowtorch to our IM program, but they are few. I mostly get this urge when an account manager I support floods my IM with “I need you on the phone NOW with this customer” when I’m in the middle of what passes for knowledge work around here, like doing research on datacenter cooling. In those instances I remind myself that it’s not the IM program’s fault, grab my golf club in a menacing fashion, and walk over to said person’s desk. In my dreams.

I service several school districts as a kind of remote helpdesk. The teachers/administrators will submit their requests to a helpdesk for on a web server but after that, when I need to communicate with them, I usually IM them. The schools don’t have a phone in every room and, assuming the computer can get on the network (and I can’t do much for it remotely if it can’t) it’s a great way of gathering further information from the teachers or getting them to input something on their end to duplicate a problem or things like that. I also log all my IM communications and mine it as a sort of KB if I see a duplicate problem.

Where I work IM has been banned, converted to jabber and then opened up at various times. At the moment, we are free to use IM and in the main it is used professionally. Much like everyone else here who has commented IM takes the place of internal calls, remote worker communications and group chats.

We do communicate with customers via IM but only really those who been with us for a while. IM, like email, is open to misinterpretation sometimes so a good working relationship is important for it to work well.

We are looking for a solution to capture and archive IM transcripts as they are as important as emails - someone could make a promise to a customer as we don’t have a record..

I used to work in tech support in an IM company, and IM (unsurprisingly) was huge there. Each of the departments had a chat room, largely used for in-team communicaitons. The developers also had rooms per product, so there was a server room and a client room.

The chat rooms were used to throw in questions, but there wasn’t an expectation of an immediate answer. The idea is the person who could best answer it would, when they had time. Unlike a forum thread, though, you didn’t have to keep hitting refresh to see if there was more in there.

There were two things that really helped in that environment. 1) Everyone used full sentences, capitalization, and punctuation. No l33t speak or txt garbage. 2) People were vicious about setting their presence (away, do not disturb, etc). It was understood that your emergency was not their emergency.

Since support is interrupt driven by its nature, I didn’t find it intrusive. It was handy to be able to ask people things while you were on the phone with a customer, too.

Something I rarely used it for was supporting directly with the customer. We only had two support engineers to support 80+ customers, and with the volume of even email traffic we had, it would have been too easy to swamp the tech support engineers into one-to-one IM conversations with customers that wouldn’t read the manual.

I did use temporary chat rooms for big customer emergencies. Jabber has federation built in, so I’d set up a temporary chat room on our server, and invite in the customer, developers, maybe a sales guy or QA. We could then all discuss the issues, paste in logs, etc. all together. I’d normally have an internal chat room then, too, so we could discuss problems away from the customer.

A side benefit of jabber is that there are a lot of clients out there for it, and everyone was allowed to use the one they liked best. Or, heck, write their own client (which they did).

Interestingly, at my shop, there is a schism. Any of the younger guys (and a few of those a little too old to be in the club but go anyway) love IM and I can’t get them to answer email without force - which the older folks (over 28 or so) ONLY use and despise IM. One guy hates both and tries to demand people call him. I check him for a neck beard every once in awhile.

Throw in to this mix you have clients who say they want to use project management software but never, ever, ever, ever do (they end up just emailing everything - I’ve ended up creating multiple inboxes just to keep the troops straight with and give them all access to it, sort of like cooks at a restaurant get orders - thank god for IMAP) - and I end up having to be the bad guy about how everyone communicates, doing what I don’t like to do and that’s mandate exactly how people work (I am not a watch-over-the-shoulder guy, I feel like we’re all adults).

I’ve talked to other organizations with a mix of younger and older workers (especially outside of technology), and they face the same interface problems, but on a grander scale as you have people completely comfortable with technology talking to people who are completely intimidated - and it inevitably breaks down.

All of the above have the potential to distract you from what you are doing, and it takes practice to identify when it’s okay to be distracted.

Personally, I don’t feel IM is any worse than the other potential distractions. We use Outlook\Exchange at my office, and I had to turn off all notifications of emails. As soon as I saw that little pop up message that I had new mail, I always felt compelled to answer it right away. IM is the same, so for me it’s about finding the right balance.

I do like Merlin’s mention - letting others know how accessible you are on a given day through your IM status.

Great response, thanks everyone. Here’s a review of the uses you described:

• Status message indicating if interruptions are welcome and how to do so
• Quick questions to individuals or teams that don’t require long, researched answers
• In place of short telephone calls
• Requests for permission to IM, telephone or visit in person
• Running chat sessions for work teams used to pose questions and get responses within hours or days

And some of the rules to make the office a happier place to be:

• Respect others’ wishes on interruptions and method by which to do so
• Set expectations on your own use — don’t respond immediately all the time if you can’t live up to it
• Ask others to respect your wishes if they violate them (including your boss, it can be done)
• Keep “office hours” on your IM for when you can be interrupted freely
• No emoticons? They don’t seem professional to me. Do they fly at your job?
• Be professional… Don’t appear to be a 14-year-old in your messages; you are at work, after all

Thanks, this will help to get my team started. I am a person that’s easily distracted, so I’ll certainly use the status messages and respect the wishes of others.

My workplace installed a Microsoft Office Communicator server to run in conjunction with our active directory and outlook setups. Why?

Because we’re international. I do tech support for them and we have service agents in some 50 countries. Remote assistance is king, but transferring calls is messy unless you can see if someone is at their desk and ready to go. Training? No problem, the manager logs in, uses a webcam to video conference for free and that’s all. We don’t have it rolled out staff-wide to all company employees yet, but the tech departments all have it and love it.

My company also uses SameTime and its associated IM clone. As an instructor for company courses, I use SameTime to provide lectures at multiple sites without having to travel - even if the sites are at different locations in the same building. We couple the SameTime client with a conference call system so we can have 2-way conversations. I have also setup my mail system to automatically file messages from students based on the subject line.

On the subject of IMs, however, it’s an entirely different story. My supervisor and training coordinator are located in different buildings, and it’s a waste of time to have to walk over to them just to ask a question or solve a problem. So, we use IMs to interact - on a brief basis. If the issue is a bit more involved, we use the IM to arrange a meeting.

Of course, we also do the “going for coffee - want one, too?” casual message, but generally minimize the personal IMs.

On the other hand, I sometimes get a “crisis” IM from my supervisor or training coordinator - typically in the form of “Please see me immediately” or “HELP! The XXX doesn’t work!” Then it’s “sneaker-net” time.

When the supervisor or training coordinator sends me a detailed IM, I immediately save the message manually, as there is no automatic message log capability. This has saved me in the past, as I have an audit trail of requests and issues to refer to when issues arise later - as they often do.

When I am trying to get something done, I put a “Doing XXX - send me an email if it’s important” kind of busy message up. Sometimes, when I put up a “Do Not Disturb” autoreply, I get a personal visit from my supervisor who wants to know why I didn’t respond to him immediately. Seems IMs are supposed to be replied to instantly and never turned off.

Company employees are required to take “Ethics” modules yearly, and the one on email and IMs is very enlightening. Seems that email and IMs are NOT private and are persistent - that is, around “forever.” That should caution users to watch what they send in email and say in IMs.

Well, in summary, I agree with the guidelines suggested by henrikmk. I think I’ll try and draw up a list of IM guidelines from the work ethics module and see how it matches what’s been posted here.

J

My current job doesn’t use IM at all, as it’s not really practical. My last job, however, used it quite a bit. We had multiple sites handling one client, so it was useful for coordinating information.

It was especially good if one of us saw a problem, because we could ping the other sites to find out if they were seeing the same thing. That way, we could narrow down if it was a local issue or one with the entire system. Plus, with multiple people researching it, we were more likely to isolate where the problem was and get the information to those who could fix it.

In my current job, IM access is blocked completely, so we can’t use it. In my last job (working for a govt agency in the SF area), I used it to communicate with my internal team (me and 4 staff people). I used it to fill the gap between the phone (which I used when I had an immediate question) and email (when it was longer-term, or when I wanted a record of the interaction). Examples would be: Please bring me the [xxx] file sometime this afternoon; Stop by my office to talk about [yyy] when you have a chance.

I loved using it like this.