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Use of Teams/Whatsapp etc in work

Rachel

Hi All

Apologies if this isn't in the correct category, I wasn't sure where to post it but am happy for it to be moved if needed.

In our business we use Teams to chat amongst ourselves and on the whole it is used well, especially for those who are communicating between different offices. However we've recently noticed some employees seem to be over-using it for chatting like they would via text and not doing their actual jobs/getting distracted and making mistakes. The same can also be said for Whatsapp, which should only be used by those employees with work phones to talk to clients. I feel in a bit of a catch 22 about what to do regarding this. On the one hand we use Teams to chat about business, ask questions etc and for this it works well, but I'm not sure how to curtail the use of it for just "having a chat" and not getting on with the job.

The employees in question have been spoken to about their workload, lack of concentration etc but it always seems to boil back down to the managers saying they can see they're on Teams chatting away all day etc.

Just wondered if anyone had experienced anything similar and had any ideas how to deal with this?

Thankyou

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  • Just to add to the thoughts of others:

    1. Judge your staff by their outcomes. If their outcomes are satisfactory, by all means point them towards the time they're wasting on chat apps. But if they're otherwise doing their job, don't stick your oar in. However...

    2. Chat apps have one big drawback over classic watercooler chat, which is the loss of non-verbal context. This means that it is far easier to cross a line of politeness and respect in a chat app than it is in person. Remote working generally reduces employee relations risks through the simple medium of keeping people away from each other. But the use of chat apps vastly raises the odds that one person's "banter" will be another person's "bullying"... or worse.

    But you have one big advantage in this scenario: by allowing people to chat on Teams and on WhatsApp associated with a company phone, they are chatting in the closest thing there is to a legal "safe space". It's company space, which means they should know that whatever they say could be seen by the company, which ought to act as a control feature. Of course, it doesn't always work that way but, believe me, when employees set up their own, separate chat groups outside the company's control... that's when things rapidly head downhill.

    So by encouraging or, at least, not discouraging them to chat on the company's own apps you are, at least, not pushing them onto platforms outside your scrutiny where the worst can (and frequently does) happen.
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  • Just to add to the thoughts of others:

    1. Judge your staff by their outcomes. If their outcomes are satisfactory, by all means point them towards the time they're wasting on chat apps. But if they're otherwise doing their job, don't stick your oar in. However...

    2. Chat apps have one big drawback over classic watercooler chat, which is the loss of non-verbal context. This means that it is far easier to cross a line of politeness and respect in a chat app than it is in person. Remote working generally reduces employee relations risks through the simple medium of keeping people away from each other. But the use of chat apps vastly raises the odds that one person's "banter" will be another person's "bullying"... or worse.

    But you have one big advantage in this scenario: by allowing people to chat on Teams and on WhatsApp associated with a company phone, they are chatting in the closest thing there is to a legal "safe space". It's company space, which means they should know that whatever they say could be seen by the company, which ought to act as a control feature. Of course, it doesn't always work that way but, believe me, when employees set up their own, separate chat groups outside the company's control... that's when things rapidly head downhill.

    So by encouraging or, at least, not discouraging them to chat on the company's own apps you are, at least, not pushing them onto platforms outside your scrutiny where the worst can (and frequently does) happen.
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