Editorial
Ping! Have you got five minutes to spare? Ping! I’ve noticed the coffee machine on level 3 isn’t working. Ping! Hi! How are you today?
There’s a workplace habit we’ve become addicted to. Beyond formal collaboration in email and meetings, chat has become the home of work conversations, arguably even the home of work. According to Microsoft 365 benchmarking, Microsoft users are processing a minimum of 32 chat messages each day. That’s a staggering amount of interaction.
There are a number of reasons behind the rise and rise of chat. For one, it’s a very familiar mode of communication. We use chat messaging in our personal lives to organize and even fulfill our social interactions. We’re members of community groups and family threads. We use it to engage with customer services with inquiries or to lodge a complaint. So it makes complete sense to adopt it in similar ways at work.
It’s also simple. In a landscape of channels, communities, spaces, virtual rooms, hubs and networks, chat cuts directly through to our colleagues. No wonder it’s so popular. With one click we can get our message out to where we want it to go without having to dig out the correct channel, compose an email (with well thought-out title) or pick up a phone.
Yet, all this connectivity comes at a cost. Hybrid working depends on collaboration, but it is also undermined by too much collaboration. And chat is both hero and villain. It can be a vital tool to stay connected when we’re not working in the same place, or at the same time. But it's also responsible for many of modern working’s failings.
The Distraction That Is Workplace Chat
Chat is incredibly distracting. It's designed to catch your attention as a short, instant form of communication. The annoying ping, the unavoidable red blob. This strongly benefits the sender, not the recipient. But curiosity (or fear) gets the better of us, so we switch tasks to take a peek.
Toggling between apps in the workplace costs us, on average, four hours per week. Then there’s the time spent reading and responding to chat messages. With the sheer numbers of chat messages we’re processing each day, it’s not just meetings that are destroying our focus time, it’s our dependency on chat. Chat messages are arguably worse than meetings as they have an irritating tendency to pop-up during our focus time — at least a meeting is usually booked in advance.
And we haven't even touched on group chats. Adding yet more people into a chat who apparently 'need to know' what's being said. Organizations are experiencing more occurrences of group chats replacing more formal processes, such as lodging a workplace issue. And it’s understandable; most workplace feedback and issue raising processes can seem like a black hole, with little to no visibility of progress. A group chat, however, means we can raise an issue with everyone we think needs to know and can potentially help us. This could be helpful to the person raising the issue, not to the many recipients who have no idea what it's about.
Related Article: Internal Communications: Email vs. Chat vs. Discussion vs. Meetings
Poor Knowledge Retention
A big advantage of written conversations is that they can be a decent knowledge repository. Nothing needs transcribing, they are often contextual so don’t require classification. Chat conversations, though, are not good for knowledge retention or sharing. Many organizations have very short chat retention policies — some as short as a week, rendering them useless for structured collaboration. They can also be hard to find: if we’re not sure who was the recipient and when a chat was written, it can be a challenge to surface what we’re looking for.
Yet we continue to see chat messages used as a primary means of team communication and coordination. The very activity that Teams channels are designed for. And are we seeing channel conversations growing like chat conversations? Heck no. There’s a real danger that important work-focused conversations are being lost in poorly tracked and managed chats.
Related Article: Multi-Tasking Is a Myth: How to Reclaim Focus and Productivity
The Hybrid Home of Spontaneous Conversations
Spontaneous conversations can provide huge value. Whether it’s building trust when we bump into each other in the office, remarking on our choice of coffee mug, or getting an answer to a question when we pass someone’s desk, quick conversations are as much a part of work culture as trying to get into the office five minutes before the boss does.
Hybrid work has somewhat complicated this. Not knowing when — or if — we will get a chance to see a colleague is changing how we ask a ‘quick’ question, or raise a problem. Often, chat is the default forum even if we are in the office.
Spontaneous conversations are hugely valuable — they are the building blocks of team culture and we certainly need a place to hold them. But should it always be chat?
Related Article: Can You Create 'Water Cooler' Culture in the Hybrid Workplace?
The Risk of Fuzzy Hybrid
Chat is a powerful way to fill the gaps when we aren’t sure of the best way to work with our colleagues. This is typically the case when we have hybrid ways of working, but haven’t actually figured out a framework of how to work, other than a simple policy or a few guidelines.
This is 'fuzzy hybrid’ — when hybrid work largely uses the same work practices as before, other than some communications about three days in the office. This version of hybrid working is where we ignore the changes needed to make it truly effective. Where we haven’t equipped our leaders and teams with the right tools and techniques they need to communicate and collaborate effectively when we’re not always in the same place at the same time.
Chat is just one symptom of fuzzy hybrid. There are many others: an overreliance on meetings, too much unnecessary communication, too little communication, a lack of connection with colleagues beyond the team, a lack of focus time … and so on.
Working out the role of chat is important. But for this to happen, leaders need to be equipped with the knowledge and tools necessary to ensure healthy collaboration and communication occurs in the right spaces, and to ensure that these spaces are safe for open and honest contribution. The collaboration and communication tools we have at work may seem like much of the same thing, but they are nuanced. The role they play depends on who we are talking to and what we are talking about. These roles, however, are rarely understood.
Consider using chat for only urgent communication, or define specific scenarios where it's appropriate. Better still, work on moving team conversations and content away from chat and into more organized and structured spaces such as Teams or Slack channels.
Chat seems like the perfect tool, an impossibly simple way to connect with our colleagues regardless of time or place. But the extent to which we're using it and the urgency it often conveys risks fragmenting knowledge, distracting work and undermining the role of collaboration in the office.
Conference
Sep
16
HR Tech Conference Las Vegas 2025
Register
Conference
Oct
27
Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
A work chat can be a powerful tool. It can also be bloody annoying. Let’s think first about what we’re trying to achieve and see if there's a better way of doing it.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
