What Messaging Apps Do We Secretly Use To Chat At Work?
I try not to text too much when I'm at work. Despite Digg's relaxed office environment, I've never managed to shake the feeling that I'm doing something illicit — or, at the very least, something that would be frowned upon — when I message my friends while I'm working.
But that doesn't mean that I don't text or message. I too succumb to the desire to send my friends a video of the latest weird occurrence on the New York City subway or to scroll through the interminable time suck that is most of my group chats during work. I try to do it as furtively as I can, and I alternate between texting and Facebook Messenger on my phone and on my laptop.
It's not a perfect system, and I've often wondered what platforms other people, including my co-workers, use when they want to talk with people outside of work during the day. If teens nowadays are using Google Docs as a means to chat with each other without raising the suspicion of teachers and parents, what kind of communicational tools are most of us using during work either for the sake of convenience or discretion?
To my surprise, Slack was one of the platforms that came up. One of my co-workers told me that Slack has become his default app of communication between him and his girlfriend during work. It's convenient — he already has it open all the time because we use Slack in our office — and unlike text messages, there's less constraint on the file sizes of the images and videos you send. While a file size limit for an MMS message falls somewhere between 300 to 600 KB, the uploading file size limit for Slack is a comfortable 1 GB. That's plenty of room to send videos to your friends or significant others of whatever cute dog you've just seen scampering about in the office.
One of the advantages Slack also has over other communicational tools is the Slackbot responses you can customize in the app, he explains. For his private Slack channel between him and his girlfriend, for instance, they have Slackbot responses set so that pictures of their cats will pop up when they type in certain keywords in their conversations. "It's a way to occasionally destress during the day," he said.
Aside from Slack, Google Hangouts, which replaced Gchat in 2013 and will soon be replaced by Hangouts Chat later this year, is also another platform that people seem to use often at work. A Digg editor who's especially fond of the chat feature says one of the reasons he prefers to use Google Hangouts during work is because everyone he knows has Gmail and, consequently, access to Hangouts, while not every one of his friends uses Slack.
When he gets off work, he uses multiple platforms, such as texting and direct messaging on Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat, but when he's working, he favors Hangouts because it allows him to chat on his computer, rather than through his phone. It's not easy to direct message someone on Instagram through your computer, and, unlike text messages, he can see who's online through Hangouts and shoot a message to one of his friends, rather than text someone who might be unavailable and not text back for hours. And the interface of Google Hangouts, because of its integration within Gmail, is also a far more work-appropriate choice than, say, Snapchat.
Using apps that are already a prevalent fixture in a workplace environment is a handy way to circumvent office oversight. It's a reason why a few of my Taiwanese friends mentioned they use Skype to message their friends. The companies they work for already use Skype for Business for office communications, and so when they want to catch up with friends or chat with co-workers but don't want their messages to be monitored, they surreptitiously switch to their personal Skype accounts.
In contrast to apps such as Slack, which began as an office collaboration platform, there are apps that didn't set out to be work communication tools, but which are now being utilized as frequently in the office as they are in personal communications because of their widespread usage. In a previous job, I used WeChat, China's largest messaging app, to liaise with co-workers and clients as often as I did to connect with my Chinese friends. And several of my friends working for Taiwanese companies mentioned that Line, the most popular messaging app in Taiwan, has become an essential part of office communication in the past few years.
The blurring of lines between work and leisure can, however, cause burnout. A friend who works as an accountant in Taiwan says it's become common for her bosses and co-workers to set up Line group chats whenever there's a new project or a new topic of discussion. Because of this, she's in as many as 15 different office group chats, which can be exhausting to manage, especially since she also uses Line to talk to her friends and family.
The embrace of Line as an office messaging tool, however, is a fairly recent phenomenon and may not be applicable to every company. A friend who works as a project manager for a consulting company says Line was banned in her office a few years ago and the ban is still in effect. If she wants to message her friends, she has to do it on her phone and with her cellular data, since the company's WiFi blocks the usage of the app. Another friend who works for an Australia-based accounting firm said she used the web version of Line until her company blocked access to it last year.
The platforms people choose to use during work may be varied, but the reasons people prefer them tend to be similar. Convenience is especially important, especially easy access via a computer. Several of the people I talked to said they preferred to use platforms that would allow them to message people on their office computers, so that they could avoid checking their phones throughout the day.
And for people who work for companies that enforce more stringent rules on social media usage, apps that allow them to masquerade their messaging with friends as office communication are a top choice. It's the reason why several of my friends who work for corporations that actively block social networking sites cited Skype as their platform of choice. It's also the reason why none of them use Facebook Messenger at work since the Facebook homepage, with its newsfeed showcased prominently in the center, is far too conspicuous and most of them choose to use Line over Facebook Messenger's web browser version.
If I've gained any takeaways from my conversations, it's that there's no limit to human ingenuity when it comes to bypassing supervision. One of my friends told me that when her company blocked the web version of Line, they found a workaround by installing a Chrome extension of the app. Through the extension, they were able to exploit the weaknesses in their company's firewall and were still able to chat with their friends, unhindered.
The easiest option, of course, is using office communication tools or platforms that are more integrated into the workplace to begin with. I'm not encouraging anyone to forego work and message their friends and family all day long, but if you're tired of having to be clandestine about your personal communications at work, camouflage and concealment is probably the best way to go, and there's no better place to start than against the backdrop of Gmail or within the multiple channels of Slack.
The article previously misstated that there's no standalone web version for Facebook Messenger.
