Achieving Internal Communication via WhatsApp ‘Groups’ — a satire

That WhatsApp is used in corporate setup now-a-days, especially in India, is not a news anymore. People use it for sending birthday wishes, sharing project updates, doing program management also, apart from sharing jokes. However basis our deep data analytics and field study, we have figured out that the most used feature of WhatsApp in corporate setup is “Group chat”.

This post is about the many possible creative ways of achieving a great internal communication plan in a corporate setup via WhatsApp groups.

1.Formal/Official group

This is usually the largest group, consisting of almost all the employees within the team (2–3 guys would drop off within first week or so, as they won’t have smartphones or they are not on Reliance Jio, but most other people would stick on even if they don’t share a single joke in an year). This group would start with a grand purpose of becoming THE communication platform across the team, but would soon turn into a platform for showing off the stock of jokes each one have. This would also be used for birthday wishes to the team members.

2.The boss’s group

This is about the first line reportees of the super-boss of the group and would be used for sharing some updates and action items. This is also the platform for sharing most politically correct jokes. Often this group would also be used for sharing links about latest and greatest work in the domain of the team and would be active during certain Quarters of the year.

3.The Program Management group

This would be created to track the most critical project of the organization, where there are dependencies on sub-teams. People would post here as soon as they click send button on their mailbox, when asking for help from dependent team members. However they would not read the messages in the group otherwise. As soon as the project goes live/semi-live, this group would die down with the seniors leaving the group, creating ground for sharing veg-jokes for better collaboration between the various team members. This group is also used for sharing New Year wishes and similar stuff.

4,5,6,7.The Location bonding groups

Generally these groups are named after the location with some local flavors added to it, like bring-on-bongs or udta-oriyas etc. This would be used for jokes in local language. If there are 3 prominent locations, there would be atleast 4 such groups.

8,9,10.The sub-team bonding groups

If there are 3/4 sub-teams within the bigger team, for sure there would be 2/3 additional groups, assuming one group would be lazy enough not to create a sub-group for its team. The purpose of this group is to share jokes in English and Hindi if there are folks from different states.

11,12,13. The clubbing/foodie groups

These folks are all about the next party/eating-out plan. The gap between the parties would be filled up with jokes. The most active period of this group generally ranges from Wednesday late evening to Friday evening. Again there may be 2/3 such groups. Often the “naughty boys’ group” would also work as the clubbing group, thus reducing the overall group count by 1 or 2.

14. The ladies group

We don’t have insider view about what this group is created for, but we have circumstantial evidence about its existence.

15,16,17. The ethnic groups

This is about the people from same ethnicity who would share photos of their visit to religious places and talk about next booze plan, after the current festive/religious season gets over.

18,19,20. The naughty boys’ groups

This is the most active group type in the corporate. It would be strictly for boys’s (and men who consider themselves as boys), as the purpose would be to share all the porn jokes that one can gather from other groups. The faster you can bring in a new joke to the group, more respect you can gain from other group members. There would be watchdogs who would also monitor if someone is resharing previously shared jokes in the group and would call the offenders out. This is the worst crime and would bring down the pedigree of such offending members. The number of such groups depend on the spectrum of age buckets. Generally if the age group of the ovreall team ranges from late 20s to late 40s, expect atleast 3 such groups.

This is just a recommendation list basis the field survey and data analysis done in various corporate setups . Obviously this is not an exhaustive list and doesn’t in anyway undermine your creativity shown in creating 10 more such groups. Please feel free to enrich further to add few more varieties to it and have fun at your office space! Keep chatting.