In many organizations, natural communication pathways start to form. Something happens or information needs to be sent out or a decision needs to be made, and you fire up a Teams window or Slack group message and invite the usual suspects.
The Drawback of Individual/Group Chats
- They’re difficult to expand. Adding someone new, it’s unclear if past history should be shared, and how far back that should go (if you even have control over it).
- They get lost over time. An important context fades into the background, and it’s difficult to tell that the conversation ever took place unless you’re explicitly scrolling or searching for it.
- They get blurred. When similar groups are in multiple chats as individuals, it can be difficult to keep subjects straight, leading to cognitive overhead to sort it all out.
Enter the Named Group Chat
The next time you find yourself discussing something that has a distinct “conceptual box” around it, consider creating a named chat (if you’re in MS teams) or a private channel (if you’re in Slack).
Now you have:
- A space with explicit context
- A way to keep the chat on topic
- The ability to archive it when it ends
- A way to signal status, in the group name
- A nice package to invite anyone to who needs to jump into the conversation, where you can share the entire history more likely than not.
An Example
We recently had a strange week at work where 4 different clients had time sensitive issues come up during the same week. Many of the same people on our side were involved in overlapping conversations across the contexts and it got messy to keep track of, fast.
I saw an opportunity. I created a group chat for each client context, added the appropriate people, and titled it “(Client) War Room”. I started each channel by recapping what we knew so far and what the next steps were. I then added a status icon (🔴, 🟡, 🟢) to indicate current urgency.
It felt like things were quickly better organized. And we were able to add leadership team members to the chat when needed, and they had easily digestible context.
What do you think?
I ended up writing this post because someone sent me an IM behind the scenes and remarked on what a neat trick it was. So, dear reader, I wanted to share it with you.
How about you? How do you use group chats more effectively in work contexts?
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