How to Overcome Team Procrastination in Messengers

Simple and effective tips to make team communication more organized and focused

Messengers facilitate productivity, don’t they?

For many companies today, messengers have become the default communication and collaboration environment, often together with other services including task-managers, email, phone calls and video conferencing services. When messengers unite all these features in a single service or involve integrations — they become a powerful medium that facilitates decision-making and problem solving. Group chats are an integral part of communications in distributed teams, in this case you need to be especially precise in your messages.

Messengers are essential when you need to clarify something immediately and when you need to inform everyone in the team about an important issue. In addition, messengers help employees to feel involved in all the activities of the team and share what they feel important or funny.

An average team member spends over a quarter of the day in the inbox, according to Mckinsey & Company. On top of that, employees spend about 20% of the day chasing information or finding someone to help them with their tasks. In the hope of saving the time, companies turn to more efficient communication and project management software. While messengers replace the inbox, keeping teams productive and informed, they may hamper work and become a distraction when they are poorly managed.

Messengers are not just a convenient and effective communication tool, but also another service where people tend to procrastinate. Of course, the problem lies not in the technology, but in in self-management skills.

“Strategic communication is at the core of effective leadership. Through a leader’s use of verbal and written symbols employees are motivated or deflated, informed or confused, productive or apathetic. A leader’s ability to carve off the verbal fat and get to the meat of an issue, idea or plan will find success at every turn.” — Reed Markham, PhD

Sometimes, instant messengers become a distraction:

• When you are a member of dozens of group chats, not being really involved in all discussions, and notifications keep popping up.
• When you expect that everyone is aware of what you’ve said and clearly understood you.
• When an employee is nervous that the offline status might seem a sign of not working and being unavailable for contacts.
• When the thread of conversation is lost in discussions and gags and it is hard to always keep on the same page with co-workers.
• When people get used to sending «K.» instead of a thoughtful and polite answer.

Productivity tips for group chats

Communication and collaboration apps allow centralizing all projects in one place, with every member having quick and easy access to information. It decreases the number of meetings and is more convenient than backward and forward emails. As a team leader, you can check the status of projects, keep on top of all issues, monitor the interactions of users and restrict access to shared sensitive data. Corporate messengers make teams transparent and agile creating a collaborative work environment where everyone is aware of the projects and events across teams.

You can increase workplace communications by implementing a number of simple strategies that will allow you to prioritize and focus on work. These options are of course not limited to customized notifications and signing out of the groups where you are not involved really. There is much more you can do.

1. Wise planning saves the time

Leverage your meetings to drive productivity. Think over the plan of every conversation and stick to it. Schedule voice and video conferences when it is essential. Use the task-manager to track the progress of your projects and assignments. For many cases, a call is much more efficient than a long thread of messages.

2. Stick to the issue

If you are holding a meeting, plan it on the calendar and mark the agenda. Clearly put the question and limit the time for discussion. Shortly before the end of the planned period, warn the chat members that it’s the time to summarize what you’ve come to. Jokes help to tune in to the creative wave; however, you can always redirect the jokers to go to a separate chat room.

3. Share the outcomes

Appoint someone to take notes of action steps that your discussion results in. If you failed to make decisions in the time you planned, schedule another meeting to let your team think over your goals and how to achieve them. Sum up the meeting highlighting the main conclusions and make sure everyone understands your next steps.

4. Offline means you are busy doing your job

Having a «busy» or «away» status in a messenger means that you are having the undisturbed time to concentrate on your work. You may prefer to be invisible for a while — this does not mean you are your co-workers can’t reach you, as they can call you in case of anything urgent. However, if their question is not the one that should be solved here and now — they can wait until you are done with what is important at the moment. The same with others — give your co-workers the opportunity to take the uninterrupted time to deal with their tasks.

5. Prioritize: ASAP means ASAP

Messengers should be used for solving the ASAP issues. By all means avoid creating the ASAP culture in your office. Use separate chats for work and for all other kinds of discussions, and while in the first group it is viable to write anything anytime and the notifications should be turned on, for other group discussions you’d better turn them off or set notifications only for the messages where you are mentioned. You’ll check them late to see what’s up.

6. Provide exhaustive feedback

Thorough feedback Improves communication in virtual teams and increases performance, motivation and satisfaction, as a study in Small Group Research shows. If you work in a distributed team with offices in different time zones and provide poor feedback to co-workers, a task that should take a few days may take months because of due to endless discussions and clarifications.

7. Moderate groups and channels

Moderate the chats in terms of security, etiquette and sticking to the point. Moderators can delete the content shared in chats from the devices of all group chat members, and they ensure that everyone in the discussion contributes to solving the issue being discussed. In VIPole, chat creators restrict the access of new members to history, set the self-destruction mode for messages, enable or disable invitations and allow or prohibit holding conferences.

8. Limit the contacts of the team

Probably the most harsh, yet the most effective way to make people use messaging for productive corporate communications is limiting their contact list to the people they actually need to interact with to do their job. VIPole Team and Enterprise solutions include the admin dashboard for managing the contacts of all team members, their security settings and for monitoring logs. Thus, you can ensure that your employees are focused and share sensitive data only within the corporate network.

To sum it up

Messengers have contributed largely to forming the the ASAP culture that should better be avoided for the sake of uninterrupted and focused work. If you follow the simple rules named above, you will feel that you’re getting things done in the effective way without losing the creative approach and the flexibility that instant messengers foster.

However, with all the technologies you have at your fingertips, never underestimate the power of real life human interactions, as a glance transmits more information than an emoji. When the team meets up by the cooler or in the canteen for sharing a coffee or two, you get the perfect opportunity for sharing ideas and concerns.

“Science may never come up with a better office communication system than the coffee break.” — Earl Wilson

VIPole offers end-to-end encrypted messaging and collaboration solutions for teams and enterprises dealing with commercially or personally sensitive information, and individuals wishing to protect themselves from hackers, identity thieves and malware.
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