Living in Chat

So we've done it - PwC has gone Chat!

Releasing Chat felt a bit like when we went Google. As a team, we were surprised early on by how awesome Chat is, and tried to translate that feeling to win users over. Winning over was needed, because Chat has not replaced "Classic" Hangouts yet. Classic is headed for the exit, but for the time being, we have both.

Here's a bit of what Chat has been doing for our teams.

Closer and more humane connections

Chat has brought our distributed team more closer together - every team should have a general team room, where you can just talk about everything. It may depend on the size of a team - but for midsized teams (~20 people), Chat will eat your social network for breakfast.

You now have a place to drop questions ("Has anybody worked with XYZ?") and say thanks in front of the team. Helping and being helped feels great and bonds the team closer together. So does posting a picture of what you did on the weekend.

Intense collaboration

Once your team is used to pay attention to the chatroom, you will see that problems get solved quicker. For distributed teams, this is the equivalent of being dragged into a glassy room for "nobody leaves until we are done". It's an intense experience.

This has a drawback though - especially in the beginning, you might feel overwhelmed. There may be too much chatter going on or there are problems that don't require your attention. Chat masterfully channels your FOMO. Once you get to that point, you will understand what "threaded conversations" in chatrooms are for, why you need chatrooms instead of group chats and how to mute cleverly. And from there on, there's no going back.