Group chats are not only fun, but also extremely practical and efficient. We can have group chats on many platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, or iMessage. They can be made up of friends, family, or a mix of both. So, why wouldn’t you have one with your coworkers?
Working from home has many of your team members distributed widely across town or even the globe. Of course, you don’t want to lose your day-to-day routine of meeting with colleagues. But, sometimes you can not be on the phone all day. Physically, your internet capabilities may affect the connection, and mentally, you are thinking of all the other tasks you have to do.
In the last few weeks of working from home, how many times have you been dragged into a conference call only to listen in silence? And how many of those conference calls could have been a group chat?
A group chat will prevent the need for many meetings! Group chats are a great way to share quick information, collaborate, and receive input from various teammates fast. They will save time and allow you to multitask on other projects, all while not tying up your telephone line.
Group chat tools allow users to:
Name the Chat
Naming the group chat is as equally as important as it is helpful. Once you have a few group chats on the go, you do not want to message the wrong one accidentally. How awkward would it be if you placed your lunch order in the ‘Finance💰📈’ group chat and not the ‘Where we going for Lunch🍕🥪’ chat.
Add/Remove Contacts
Make it a party or leave it more exclusive! If you find you need the input of another colleague, quickly drag and drop the user into the chat and remove them once necessary.
Share Files
Send pictures, GIFS, PDFs, links to GDrive, you name it! All of the file-sharing features in a single chat are applied in a group chat. The bonus is you can send them to more people easily.
Scheduled Group Chats
You schedule meetings and calls, so why not plan a group chat? Users can set times to meet, but instead of in person or on the phone, they can do so virtually through chat. By doing so, it will keep everyone in the loop, by sharing a lot of information at once. Especially if a user is unable to attend the ‘meeting’ they can go back and read what they missed in the chat.
Scheduled group chats can be a permanent chat that is recurring. For example, you could have “blog chat” where every Monday, users dump their ideas they have for the blog and sort through them together. Or temporary group chats that will last until we get back into the office and are ‘back to normal.’
Once we are all back on track, maybe you’ll find yourself still using scheduled group chats!
Search in the Message
On a phone call, if someone isn’t listening or paying attention, they can lie and say, ‘Oh sorry, I was on mute, could you repeat that?’ In a group chat, users can quickly catch up on reading the messages by using the search bar. If a colleague is asking for their thoughts on a specific topic, the user can write the term in the search bar and it will pop up.
Turn the Chat into a Conference Call
If you really think you need a conference call, a group chat can turn into one with the click of a button! All the members in the conversation will join the call and users can easily add/remove participants.
There are many ways to collaborate and a group chat is just one! Not everything has to be a meeting. Just like the running joke, ‘that meeting could probably be an email,’ that conference call could probably have been a group chat. 😉