Optional/intermittent instant chat (like IRC) is great for
watercooler-like social bonding of geodistributed team members.
Especially if it's ephemeral, not something that's logged/monitored, and
not too accessible to any boss.
For very work-related, rapid, interactive communication, mandatory
instant chat can also work for on-duty/on-call devops/sysadmin stuff,
which is accustomed to being very interrupt-driven.
For workers doing nontrivial analysis/design/programming, often
requiring flow states, my only real-world data point for *mandatory*
instant chat for top developers was that it was hated, and seemed very
counterproductive. (Eventually, the manager responsible for the hated
practice blew up in a different way.)
For workers doing nontrivial analysis/design/programming, I've seen
cases in which *optional&intermittent* instant chat was sometimes good.
But two things to be aware of:
* If you want to not lose organizational knowledge that might've
otherwise appeared in email, you will be tempted to capture all the
instant chat for the organization/project. But if you capture it, you
risk killing much of the watercooler team bonding. (Well, maybe new
college grads might not feel a chilling effect, but I bet most them
eventually will realize why they should've.)
* When the instant chat is available, it will tend to siphon off some
important knowledge/interaction that otherwise would've happened on the
email list or other non-instant modality, and might've been better there.
In general, for developers, I would usually choose to have email (and
code/docs/wiki) for important things and knowledge, and ephemeral
instant chat available for optional/intermittent watercooler bonding.
(But this doesn't apply to organizations in which you don't/shouldn't
trust your colleagues, or even much like them. Which is a lot of
dotcoms in the Bay Area convention of loyalty-free job-hopping, and
bubble IPO-hopping. I wouldn't know a good thing to advise for that
kind of organization, except for some people to hop once more, to a more
warm-fuzzy organization. :)
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