what better place to catch up on blogging than a flight delay at DFW?
Flemming Funch writes about a study that contradicts some popular stereotypes about the use of IM at work.
- Although a common impression of IM is that it’s used primarily for simple questions and quick clarifications, we found that was true only about 28 percent of the time.
- Despite the perception that IM is commonly used for social purposes in the workplace, we found that was rarely the case. Only 13 percent of the conversations we monitored included any personal topics whatsoever, and only 6.4 percent were exclusively personal.
- Concerns that IM might distract people from their work proved to be unfounded. The majority of the workplace IM conversations we observed, 62 percent, focused entirely on work-related matters.
Socialtext is a distributed team, we use IM a lot, and this certainly reflects my experience. There’s worry about the misuse of informal communications tools like IM and blogs at work, but these aren’t well-founded. People probably engage in the same amount of off-topic, relational conversation about sports, recipes, kids in electronic conversation as they do in analog conversation.