Why Whatsapp should NOT be used for Team Communication!

Businesses today rely enormously on WhatsApp for day to day activities. Think of all the WhatsApp groups you have with a teammate. A work group is created to carry out every small discussion and in turn, you end up losing track.

Operations teams essentially run on WhatsApp for the following reasons:

1. Real-time updates to all members
2. Universal adoption
3. Ease of use

While the above points are significant to the business metrics there are certain consequential flaws in the process. Some of the monumental issues are listed below.

1. Data Tracking

While this may seem trivial you will be surprised to know the disaster it is for most businesses. WhatsApp is a platform built for chatting and to provide ease of personal communication. Data, chat, response, etc. analysis cannot be performed unless done manually. It is near impossible to go back and look for specific data such as tracking an event that occurred in the past or even get metrics like how many issues were resolved in the day and what was the TAT(turn around time) for the same.

The phrase “Data is Gold” is true and you may not realize it until you need data for optimization, expansion, or designing automated systems based on machine learning.

2. Data Privacy

Although WhatsApp is a secure platform and as a company, they take necessary measures to protect data, hackers and security researchers often find hacks, bugs, or vulnerabilities that may expose your data to the outside world. This is a cause of severe concern for bigger companies and businesses.

From a data privacy perspective, consider a use case wherein a team shares all the leads on a WhatsApp group. These leads then get assigned to individual executives. If an executive quits the organization, he may not get access to the new leads, however, he still has access to all the legacy leads, reports, or analysis that were previously shared on the WhatsApp groups

An interesting article that recently came out and highlights how WhatsApp chat history gets deleted in specific scenarios

3. Accountability

Whatsapp is an informal communication platform and may not be taken seriously by everybody. There may be times when a task is missed and you may not be able to track it back to the owner or even worse miss it completely. WhatsApp Business may let you label chats but it does not let you label conversations under chats. This leads to accountability shortcomings.

4. Clutter

99.4% of users today use WhatsApp for personal use. When professional chats are brought to WhatsApp, it leads to a clutter of information. Several times you may miss a conversation because there were plenty of other ongoing conversions including your personal chats, broadcast messages, or group discussions as well.

5. Mental Health & Team Motivation

Organizations invest a great deal of time and effort to ensure that their teams are content and enjoy good mental health. They organize group events and other team activities to corroborate the same. However, if your team makes use of WhatsApp for communication, the anxiety level is bound to soar high. Imagine having to constantly check your phone and see an issue reported on one of the official groups. One is forced to keep thinking about the reported issue even when it is not a critical issue and can be taken up on the following working day.

To deduce, we must make a conscious effort to distinguish the use of our professional and personal applications. There are alternatives which provide all the Whatsapp features along with more professional features that would help an organization optimize their workforce and achieve business metrics.

6. Process Adoption

When starting with a small team, using Whatsapp can be simple and Whatsapp groups can easily be used for project management activities. But as you expand, your team can grow exponentially and migrating to an actual project management tool can be an exhaustive task then.

Adopting a new application is always a challenge but imagine moving from whatsapp to another process oriented application, this would be a bigger challenge. This stems from the fact that Whatsapp has already been heavily adopted and it is easy for any group/segment of user.

Whatsapp Business is introducing a number of features to solve these challenges but till they crack the above, avoid using whatsapp and move to applications like Slack, Flock or Microsoft Teams.

Some benefits of using a professional communication tool like Slack/Flock are:

1. Ensures privacy of data and data remains secure even when an employee leaves the organisation since account is linked to official email
2. Integrates with various project management tools
3. A number of integrations available with an option for custom API integration
4. Functions like Threads, Mentions, Reactions, Snooze are helpful
5. Helps maintain work life balance with a clear personal vs professional chat demarcation

If you have faced these issues with Whatsapp in your current organisation or need help in figuring out what chat tool would be ideal for your organisation, drop a comment…