Adoption of Just Connect

Use cases

Just Connect is great tool for team collaboration. It generally supports two use cases:

• One-to-one chats: enabling conversations among two people
• Group chats: enabling conversations in teams

Fostering adoption

Using Just Connect is easy and requires no technical explanation. It works similar to chat tools like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger or Threema. Nevertheless, you can foster adoption of Just Connect by:

• Educate your colleagues 
  People often assume that chat tools are not suited for work simply because they know them from their private life. However, chatting just means being able to communicate in real-time – which is exactly what you need when you want to interact and collaborate with a person or team.

• Create chat groups
  Today nearly everybody has chat groups for every aspect of their lives: family, friends, sports, school, event etc. The same will happen at our workplaces: To enhance team collaboration, we need to create a chat group for every project, team, department etc. Initially, you should actively foster the creation of chat groups. Once people get used to chatting, it will no longer be necessary: just like in our private life, where somebody in the group will think of it anyways. This was not always the case: We all needed some time from our first use of e.g. WhatsApp when most of us did not even know about chat groups. Actively fostering the creation of chat groups at the workplace will considerably speed up the adoption process. 

Duration of chat groups

The duration of a chat group depends on the duration of the respective team or task. It can vary between less than a day to more than a decade:

• Long-term chat groups
  Examples of long-term chat groups include departments which may last as long as the company exits.

• Medium-term chat groups
  Examples of medium-term chat groups include projects which may last anywhere between a few weeks and several years.

• Short-term chat groups
  Examples of short-term chat groups include events and decisions. Event-based chat groups temporarily enable a team to communicate for the duration of the event. An example would be a chat group that enables the communication of a cross-functional team during a trade show or training event. Chat groups for decisions usually last until a decision is made. An example would be a chat group supporting the discussion of several interviewers on whether or not to hire a job candidate.

Size of chat groups

While one-to-one chats obviously consists of two people, the size of chat groups depends of the size of the respective team. It can vary between a few people and the entire organization. The size of the chat group will alter the use case and frequency of use:

Chat groups up to <50 people
The usual size of teams that collaborate on a specific task or project on a daily basis is (much) less than 50 members. As a matter of fact, most work gets done in teams of less than 10 people. If a project team gets much bigger, the work is usually split up in sub teams. Otherwise the meetings will become inefficient since only one person can talk at a time, and not everybody needs to be involved in the entire discussion.

Similarly, collaborating in large chat groups would result in a high level of distraction and information overload since too many people will receive too many notifications and messages. Instead, most of the collaboration will happen in one-to-one chats and small chat groups up to 10 people.

The bigger the chat group, the less work will actually get done in the group, and the more the communication will shift from collaboration among the group members to one person purely informing the other members of the group e.g. about an outcome of a discussion within a smaller sub group.

Chat groups >50 people
To avoid unnecessary distractions, large chat groups should only be used cautiously for two use cases:

• Information such as quick updates: for example, letting everybody know that the cafeteria cannot open today because of a power outage in the kitchen.

• Quick coordination: for example, informing the entire IT department that a critical part of the technical infrastructure is not working and asking who can fix the problem.

When large groups of people are being addressed, it often involves two use cases that can be better addressed with two other communication tools:

• News content
  If you want to communicate news content to large groups of people such as the entire company, social networks like Just News are better suited for the use case because that’s what they are made for (see adoption of Just News). They allow for displaying the news content in an attractive and aggregated way in an editorial order separated from the collaborative stream of chat messages.

• Formal communication
  If you want to make a formal announcement (e.g. such as an acquisition, divestment, layoff etc.) or disseminate a legal information (e.g. changes in data protection acts) to a large group of people such as the entire company, writing an email as an electronic version of a letter is the best communication medium for the use case.

Usage

In the end, collaborating with each other is mostly about talking to each other. Since chatting is a digital way of talking to each other in writing, it is a use case which is usually needed many times a day. Thus, it is possible to implement Just Social by using Just Connect as the only app and still achieve successful adoption.

Moreover, chatting works synchronously as well as asynchronously. Thus, the people involved do not have to meet in person and also do not need to be available at the same time. Thus, chatting will considerably increase the speed of communication since it allows to read and respond from anywhere at any time and switch between different conversations quickly.

For these reasons, chatting has become the most frequent form of communication in our private life. As a matter of fact, the very few people who still do not use any chat tools like WhatsApp are almost cut off from communication because many people are not willing to send emails any longer. Needless to say, phone calls and meetings in person will obviously remain very important too.

At our work places, chat will also (and in some companies already has) become the most frequent form of written communication. However, email will remain an important tool since business communication tends to be more formal than private communication, especially with external parties such as clients. Needless to say, calls and meetings will remain crucial as well because they provide more context than written forms of communication by additionally transporting voice and body language, respectively.