I generally work in largish teams of people when I’m out on contract and I’ve noticied that even if you are sitting opposite someone you tend to use IM to communicate.  This could be Windows Messenger, Skype or one of the many many other IM clients.

Yesterday I found myself doing it again and I suddenly thought about how wierd this is.  You could reach over and physically touch someone and yet you are writing messages rather than talking.  Sometimes if it is important you’ll suddenly break out of the text chat and straight into a real voice conversation.  If you are overhearing this sort of communication it’s the most bizare thing.  All of a sudden someone deep in thought typing and staring at their screen will turn to the person next to them and say angrily “Yes – but I’ve appended the variables to the query string!” and the person they apparantly just started shouting at out of the blue calmly replies to them and then both parties go back to the squabble over IM.

Some people could argue that this method of communication is going to ruin social interaction (they’ll also probably read the Daily Mail) but I think that this can be a very important and valid ways to get things done.  But as with everything there is also a downside.

IM Pros

1 – How many times have I been deep in code, trying to think my way through or around a complicated problem and the someone has tapped me on the shoulder for a chat.  It completely breaks my flow and now I’m not really concentrating on either the conversation my colleague wants to have as I’m still half thinking about the code – but even worse I know it’s going to take at least 15 mins to get back into it.  If that person had quickly fired over a message on IM without breaking step I could zap back something along the lines of “Not now, give me x mins and we can talk.”  That way I’m not interupted and can get my job done faster and the person who wanted a chat will get my undivided attention when I’ve finished whatever I’m up to.

2 – You can have discussions over IM that you wouldn’t have out loud.  These could be along the lines of technical conversations where you need web addresses or lines of code zapped backwards and forwards.  You could be trying something out but you don’t want to broadcast to everyone in the immediate area that you don’t know if it’s going to work and you just want to work directly with someone else.

3 – You can speak your mind.  If you are worried about offending someone it is easier to have a text conversation as you can consider what it is you want to say before saying it.  This isn’t always possible in a face to face chat as you may forget an important point.  In a text chat you can take a bit of time to think rather than having to go straight back.

4 – You can ignore them.  You can’t ignore someone standing at your desk – it would be rude, but no one is going to get upset if you ignore a IM for a few minutes.

IM Cons

1 – It can be very secretive.  It is very easy to have a conversation behind someone’s back in plain sight.  Normally this may be the odd bitchy comment or exasperated “You’ll never guess what suchandsuch has done now!” that you’d probably have with people on your lunch break, but it can become quite insidious and undermining.  For example I was working with a weak Project Manager who was perfectly nice, but not really that effective.  This combined with everyone jumping on IM as soon as they’d just had a meeting with them to moan to the rest of the team pretty much wiped out any respect the team had for the PM and made a difficult project neigh on impossible.

2 – Its FUN!  Swapping jokes, firing over funny links or merely whittering to each other over IM is fantastic fun.  And possibly a major time waster.  This is probably the biggest worry for employers over using IM.  They want everyone to focus on their jobs and not thinking up witty retorts to their mate in Accounts.  However if your team does have loads of time to waste sending silly IMs or even worse are happy to ignore their work whilst sending messages then the problem is going to be something other then their IM habbit.

3 – Text communication removes all other human communication channels.  You cannot see someone’s face or read their body language.  It is really easy to write something (normally in jest) that is taken in the best case out of context or the worst case is taken really badly.  A quick example was someone asked me to change something over IM.  I sent back “Whatever” and didn’t add a smily at the end.  The next thing I knew the phone went and I had a really angry PM to deal with.  Even after I calmed them down I still am not convinced that I was just mucking around and of course I was happy to make the change.

So to sum up, and don’t forget this is only my opinion, I couldn’t work as effectivly without IM.  Even with the aparant stupidity of sending the guy sitting next to me IMs – I think as a method of unobtrusive communication about stuff that can wait it is vital.  Missusing IM I believe shows that there is a problem with something in the company, if someone is being undermined in IM chats then more than likely they would be undermined by people anyway.  If people are just using it to gossip then there is a problem with the respect of employees for the company.