Should Professionals Text?

By Allison Honoré & Emily Zimmerman

You sit at your desk, and while working on a project, realize you have a quick question for another member of the team. You can see your team mate across the office. They're working on something themselves. If you email them, it might take a while to get a response if they don’t have their email open. If you get up and walk over, you force them to remove their headphones, and because you don't want to be rude, you have to have a little small talk first. Your simple question has turned into a long, arduous dilemma. It may seem too personal, but a simple text message is the medium for the job.

Fostering a casual group text for those involved in a group project enables team members to have a space less formal than an email, it should feel more like a conversation rather than a practiced and edited email. It makes members feel more connected to each other and allows for faster, more effective communication. The ability to have perpetual contact for a group means that those long waits for an email response go out the window, meetings have to happen less often as an update can be given at any time.

A team knows its successes and its failures as they come when the team shares them in real time. A team that keeps up with each other through text messaging also has the ability to be more personal and friendly rather than formal and excessively professional through email. They see each other as comrades and have more of an ability to trust one another and ask for help when they need it, not when it’s too late. For many casual work acquaintances, face to face conversations can be flustering. Having to create a false conversation before and after the actual purpose of the meeting for the sake of being polite slows down the progress of both members. A phone call can seem like a disturbance if the receiving member is working on something else, or is deeply involved in a project. Teams bond easily over text messages because of its dynamic and multitasking nature. A text message conversation helps remove hierarchical boundaries, real or imagined. It puts everyone on a level playing field.

Text messaging has a bad reputation and is dismissed as being more for youth than professionals, but there is no reason it can’t be utilized by anyone. While not every conversation related to any project should be sequestered to a text message conversation, a majority of it can. Compared to non-texters, those teams who exclusively used text messaging in Chris Lam’s 2012 study communicated more, felt more connected, and sent more questions, answers, and non-project related messages. Companies should talk to their teams about text messaging and foster an open enough environment to allow them to utilize this medium. It’s there in your pocket already waiting for you, you just have to know how to use it.