You might remember when, around the turn of the century, instant messenger (IM) services such as those offered by AOL and Yahoo transformed the way we could talk to each other. Chatting with IM was just like talking on the telephone, except that you used the Internet instead of a phone line and instead of speaking you wrote messages back and forth. “Tone of voice” was expressed by posting emoticons (now called emojis).
ReportLinker has learned recently that IM has since transformed the way people talk to each other at the office (including the virtual office), too.
While email still dominates in-office communications, more than one-fourth (28%) of 513 United States survey respondents said that they make significant use of IM at work, including 30% of respondents who said that their main communications tool is email.
Indeed, 43% of respondents said that IM services are available at their place of work, including 71% of workers in the tech industry and 62% of internationally-working people. Telecommuting instead of physically commuting to and from an office is a norm in those fields of work, and IM services lend themselves beautifully to communications for telecommuters. The variety of IM services is wide, but 41% of IM users at small businesses (50 or fewer employees) utilize Facebook At Work services.
IM services are convenient and inexpensive (they cost nothing in and of themselves). You can also be on the telephone with one person while simultaneously IMing someone else. These factors have made IM popular in the workplace, especially in businesses that provide employees with laptops (75% of respondents) or tablets (47% of respondents).
IM services are quite popular with employers and employees today because they tend to enhance worker productivity. Indeed, 35% of respondents said that IM services make them or would make them more productive, including 45% of respondents who currently utilize IMs for work. A mere 17% worried that IMing makes them or would make them less productive.
Just about half of all respondents (49%) said that IM services enhance their collaborative efforts with work colleagues, and that included 58% of respondents who already make use of IM for work. Fortifying this perception, 22% cited work-efficiency and 14% cited better team collaboration as the main advantage of utilizing IMing. Another 14% cited reduced email loads as the main advantage. However, 24% of respondents said that they feel pressured to be always available to respond to an IM even if they’re busy with other work, and 23% said that IMing cuts into their face-to-face interaction time (which they would prefer).
Instant messaging is so popular and pervasive in today’s world that it won’t be going away anytime soon. While it’s not perfect (nothing is), IM offers such advantages that it may not be long before it replaces email the number-one workplace communications tool.
