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IM best-practices in the workplace

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.

petsim's picture

IM is humongous in our company

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!

 
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