Understanding Team Chat Culture and Its Place In The Workplace

[April 14, 2019] Workplace communications have adapted and developed across time and have certainly entered a new phase in recent years, with the development of so many more communication features, such as web-conferencing and instant messaging. Team chat is one such development, allowing workplace teams to be in constant dialogue. Here are a few things you should know about team chat culture and how to optimize yours for success.

Define The Team Chat

One of the major risks with team chats is that they are essentially futile: valuable in theory but a waste of time in reality. One of the easiest ways to let this happen is by not defining the purpose and tone of the chat when you start it. Assign a particular project to the chat or define it as a question forum.

Identify Any Problematic Members

“Sometimes in the group chat culture, there might be an individual or a couple of individuals who misunderstand the purpose of the chat. You have to be careful about this and address them privately to ensure that they don’t derail the whole thing,” warns Alan Palmer, team leader at Assignment Writing Service and OXEssays. If you have someone in the chat who isn’t cooperating, it can knock the whole thing off balance, so deal with this efficiently.

Maintain A Quality Of Writing

On the one hand, this is a team chat, it’s not emails or letter. On the other hand, it is important to maintain professional standards, so that the way people write outside of the chat isn’t affected by a perceived drop in quality within the team chat. One way to ensure this doesn’t happen, is by maintaining your own standards. You have to know what to look out for and what is incorrect. So, tools like ViaWriting, BoomEssays, MyWritingWay, StateOfWriting and PaperFellows can be of great help in ensuring the written quality of the communications between team members.

Keep Things Strict

Chat culture is great for efficiency, good communication, and overall atmosphere. But it can lead to people getting slack. Joanna Landy, tech lead at Essayroo and SimpleGrad, writes that “…group chat often leads to an overly casual, familiar environment. Although the modern workplace does tend to be more friendly, it’s important that standards are maintained, and that quality of work remains consistently strong.” Problems need to be identified swiftly and worked at so that you don’t find that your workplace is falling into sloppy behavior, attitudes and work simply because of the introduction of a chat culture.

Use It In Place Of Physical Presence

The above point being said, team chat is actually a really good way for people to conduct business constantly through the year without feeling put upon or overworked. It also allows you to let employees have more breaks from ‘work’, by which I mean the physical workplace, and incorporate their career into their personal lives a bit more.

Conclusion

Team chat culture is one of a myriad of ways in which the modern workplace is transforming from the boring, restricting, unhealthy place it was of old into something much more vibrant; a place people actually want to be, filled with people who are keen to do the best work they can. Use it wisely and you can achieve great results.