Abstract
The technology convergence witnessed in the 21st century has heralded a new technological communication frontier for organizations. This report specifically aims to delineate how instant messaging (IM) could be harnessed to drive the business and organizational strategies of M&M’s into the future.
The success of M&M’s has been attributed to many factors, including eye-catching and distinctive advertisements and promotions, effective employee and consumer participation and feedback, extensive marketing strategies, affordable pricing, and a broad assortment of customized product possibilities.
Through a critical evaluation of existing literature, it has been demonstrated that the real-time functionality of IM, simplicity of use, unique affordances, collaboration capability, and rich presence has endeared many organizations to adopt the technology. Other factors such as presence awareness, visual alerting, and capability to support multiple synchronous conversations have been highlighted as strong points for IM.
Among the disadvantages, it has been noted that IM can not only turn into a productivity drain if misused, but it can open a can of worms in terms of security risks and legal issues if it is ineffectually used.
IM represents one of the most rapidly proliferating communications tools that are swiftly being adopted by global organizations. A critical review of literature contained in this report demonstrates that corporate IM use is substantial and growing.
Consequently, the most fundamental thing for M&M’s to do is to swing into action and ensure that policies and frameworks are put in place with the aim to holistically harness the power and communication capabilities offered by IM.
Introduction
The technology convergence witnessed in the 21st century has heralded a new technological communication frontier for organizations as unprecedented discoveries and innovations continue to bombard the global business scene with a panorama of communication technologies aimed at establishing and sustaining the groundwork for organizations to meet their business goals and objectives.
Business leaders are taking notice of the advantages offered by new and emerging technologies such as email, videoconferencing, mobile telephony, teleconferencing, and in recent times, instant messaging (Primeaux & Flint, 2004; Cameron & Webster, 2005), and many organizations have adopted either one or several of these communication platforms depending on their business needs and objective of use (Symon, 2000).
While consecutive studies have been published to demonstrate the efficacy and productive capabilities of the emerging communication technologies, the knowledge of their weak links and perceived disadvantages is also in the public domain. This report specifically aims to delineate how instant messaging (IM) could be harnessed to drive the business and organizational strategies of M&M’s into the future.
A Synopsis of M&M’s Company
For the over 60 years that it has been in existence, M&M’s has created a market share that is yet to be matched by the company’s close competitors. In 2004, the company was on record for realizing an impressive $201 million in candy sales in the United States alone, a feat that propelled it into the top spot in the market for boxed and bagged chocolates in the country (Wax, 2010).
The success of M&M’s has been attributed to many factors, including eye-catching and distinctive advertisements and promotions, effective employee and consumer participation and feedback, extensive marketing strategies, affordable pricing, and a broad assortment of customized product possibilities(M&M Website, 2010).
According to Nash (2000), for contemporary businesses to remain competitive and be profitable, they must develop the right communication tools aimed at eliciting maximum employee and customer satisfaction.
Although M&M’s has a hierarchical organizational structure to allow for efficient leadership through the rank and file of the company, the management takes cognizance of the fact that its corporate culture must emphasize the brand essence, promise, and unique personality (Rehoboth, 2004).
The concept that the company’s products, services, and experiences are a major constituent of its personification has been well enshrined in the company’s strategies geared towards fulfilling the needs and expectations of an expanding market base.
M&M’s take cognizance of the fact that employees are the organization’s most valued asset and, as such, it exercises an open-door communication strategy aimed at availing to employees the leverage to be flexible, creative and innovative as long as products meets or surpasses customer expectations (Wax, 2010).
M&M’s has been in the frontline in adopting computer-based technologies with the view to integrate them into the frameworks and platforms that guide the day-to-day running of the company, especially in terms of management-employee interactions, management-customer interactions (feedback), and sales improvement (Rehoboth, 2004).
The organizational culture in M&M’s is aligned to the basic principles of enhancing employee value preposition, provision of unmatched products and services, and improving efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity through continuous uptake of relevant technologies.
According to Keyton (2005), “…organizational culture is the set of artifacts, values, and assumptions that emerge from the interactions of organizational members” (p. 1). At M&M’s, the management is aptly aware that creating an enabling environment for free and effective management-employee communication is the cornerstone to a prosperous and resilient organizational culture.
A Comprehensive Analysis of the Impact of IM in the Workplace
According to Cameron & Webster (2005), “…Instant Messaging (IM) represents a communication technology that allows employees to send and receive short text-based messages in real time and to see who else is on line and currently available to receive messages” (p. 86).
Intrinsically grounded on a previous technology known as the Internet Relay Chat, IM was initially intended to offer home internet users a platform through which they could socialize with friends and family members.
However, as the efficient and cost-effective capabilities in supporting informal communications came into the public limelight in the 1990s (Huang & Yen, 2003), conscientious and assiduous managers grabbed the opportunity and started to experiment with the technology, especially on how it could be applied to solve or lessen workplace communication challenges.
The discovery and adoption heralded a new form of communication medium that is today known as instant messaging.
The uptake of IM by organizations has been unprecedented, with available statistics demonstrating that 26 percent of organizations operating in the U.S. were already using the technology as an official communication service by 2004, and an additional 44 percent of organizations had employees who used the technology on their own (Primeaux & Flint, 2004).
Market analysts’ projections for corporate IM stood at 229 million users worldwide in the first quarter of 2005 (Cameron & Webster, 2005), and IBM (2008) “…estimates are that by 2011 business use of IM will have risen to about 400 million accounts – with applications designed for businesses used in 150 million of those instances” (p. 4).
The statistics demonstrates the scope of IM adoption by organizations across a span of less than 10 years, with all indications showing the adoption is on an upward trend. The factors assessed below clearly demonstrate why such a trend in IM adoption is in the offing.
IM and Employees Communication Patterns
Collaboration is primarily perceived as the initiator of innovation (IBM, 2008), and innovation is key to achieving organizational efficiency, effectiveness and productivity.
In today’s competitive business environment, sharing information and experiences can be decisive in driving organizational success and set outcomes, and the IM protocol guarantees an outstanding framework through which employee communication patterns can be molded to enhance information sharing and collaboration within the organization as well as across geographical locations (Quan-Haase et al., 2005).
Traditional communication patterns may fail to strike a cord with today’s business requirements especially with the realization that many organizations have switched into virtual workplaces (IBM, 2008), and that employees are expected to have timely information to make sound judgments relating to the daily operations of the organization.
As such, IM proactively influences their communication capacities and patterns by not only extending a framework through which relevant knowledge can be tapped from the relationships established with other stakeholders, but also ensuring that the needed information is immediately available when it is needed due to IM’s aspect of immediacy (Symon, 2000).
According to Cameroon & Webster (2005), IM systems contain a presence or peripheral awareness capacity, implying that the management or employees will have a general sense of who is around what they are currently engaged on at specific times in the workplace. The authors further suggest this type of “…presence awareness represents a type of peer monitoring designed to enhance communication between colleagues” (p. 86).
As such, IM greatly influences employee communication patterns by virtue of the fact that users can actively see the status indicators of other subscribed users who are online, and who are presently available to perform certain functions as may be deemed fit by the organization.
This function greatly reduces time wastage, and enables the organization to focus on the available manpower resources to perform tasks that may have great ramifications in terms of enhancing its competitive advantage. Time usage, according to IBM (2008), is critical to the attainment of productive capacities.
Huang & Yen (2003) observes that the solid and reliant communication patterns extended to employees by IM systems has enhanced workflow processes within organizations and across locations.
It is also imperative to note that IM influences employees’ communication patterns by extending to them the capability to engage in multiple, concurrent, and synchronized conversations to influence consensus or decisions made in meetings or other corporate gatherings (Rennecker, 2005).
For instance, an employee engaged in a meeting convened by stakeholders may text his boss to request for advice or clarification while still actively engaged in the normal face-to-face conversation with the stakeholders.
Lastly, it is true that the nature of communication in work-settings has dramatically changed and that “…managers and professionals often communicate in fluid, multiple social networks rather than being sorely embedded in a single work group” (Quan-Haase, 2005, para. 1). IM certainly influences the communication patterns in the social networks.
Potential Impact of IM to the Organization
Many researchers and business analysts have demonstrated a clear interest in evaluating the possible impact of IM as an emerging tool for business communication. The real-time functionality, simplicity of use, unique affordances, and rich presence has been noted by Greengard (2003), Cameroon & Webster (2005), Primeaux & Flint (2004), and Rennecker et al (2003) as some of the foremost factors why many organizations are using IM systems for communication purposes.
According to Rennecker et al (2003), IM provides the ability to not only detect when other employees are available for communication via the network (presence awareness), but the system makes use of visual prompts to notify recipients of an impending message (visual alerting).
In the workplace, these capacities are fundamentally important to drive efficiency, productivity, and ensure that critical time is sparingly used to drive the organization’s agenda forward. The real-time function enables users to get immediate responses, thus are able to act and make decisions based on knowledge and collaboration. This, according to IBM (2008), is a plus in today’s knowledge-based economy.
According to Rennecker et al (2005), “…IM is unique in its capability to support multiple, simultaneous, synchronous conversations” (p. 199). This capability, known as polychromic interactivity, is essentially needed in today’s business environment, especially in organizations dealing with offering a wide array of services to multiple clients.
In such an arrangement, IM can be used by employees to communicate privately with other employees and request for clarifications or instructions while still engaged in another coordinated interaction, preferably with the customer.
When employed in this manner, IM has the capacity to essentially alter the “…temporal ordering of meeting-related interactions, including fact-finding, consensus formation, and decision-making” (Rennecker, 2005, p. 199).
This implies that IM does not only saves time, but also enables organizations to enhance their productive capacities by virtue of the fact that the interactions, consensus reached, and the decisions taken will have either positive or negative ramifications on the organization.
IBM (2008) underscores the fact that some emerging communication technologies such IM boosts an organization’s collaborative capacities, hence its productive acumen. Collaboration, more than anything else, institutes the innovation needed to enable organizations achieve an edge over their competitors.
Employees in a virtual workplace are now collaborating using IM, either as a complimentary platform to email communication or as its substitute. According to Quan-Haase et al (2005), IM is also popular among workers since “…it adds speed and ease to workplace communication, and eliminates the time typically lost to ‘telephone tag’ or wasted trips of a coworker who is absent or otherwise occupied” (p. 2).
This has obvious time and productivity implications for the organization, not mentioning the fact that it acts as a bridging tool between departments, therefore saving more time and ensuring efficient coordination. Below, some of the disadvantages of IM are evaluated.
Disadvantages of IM
There has been some weak links and disadvantages associated with emerging technologies, and IM is no exception. Greengard (2003) acknowledges that “…while the goal of staying in touch with employees, customers, and business partners is noble enough, today’s technology can create more than a few diversions and even devastations along the way” (p. 84).
According to the author, IM can not only turn into a productivity drain if misused, but it can open a can of worms in terms of security risks and legal issues if it is ineffectually used.
The above sentiments are also shared by Chudoba et al (2005) and Primeaux & Flint (2004), who argue that most employees take advantage of the communication technology to chat with each other on issues unrelated to business, and to friends and family members outside the organization.
Available statistics reveal that “…30 to 40 percent of internet use in the workplace isn’t related to business, and employee misuse of the internet is a $63 billion problem for cooperate America” (Greengard, 2003, p. 85). While IM is only a small component of the enormous internet universe, there is no guarantee that such systems will not be abused by employees in the absence of a strict regulatory framework.
Harmful computer viruses can be transmitted via IM protocols, with some having the capacity to sabotage critical business processes. Indeed, hackers and data thieves can easily penetrate the security settings of some free IM services such as Yahoo! Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger due to the fact that the texts sent through IM are not encrypted. Legal challenges can also be potentially dangerous.
By virtue of the fact that IM communications are not electronically recorded at the organizational level, “…companies can find themselves in a netherworld where it’s one party’s word against another’s” (Greengard, 2003, p. 84).
There are concerns that IM, due to its easy usability, may be a source of interruption of workplace tasks (Garrett & Danziger, 2008). A recent ethnographic study extensively quoted by these authors “…revealed that workers spent an average of just 11 minutes on a task before being interrupted or moving on to a new task, and more than half the interruptions (57%) were unrelated to the task at hand” (p. 1).
While it is known that the most common types of workplace interruptions revolves around receiving calls and conversations, some computer-mediated communication platforms such as IM and email can actually exacerbate the problem.
In many workplace scenarios, IM supplements other existing forms of communication, resulting in an increase in the overall volume of communications taking place during work hours, thus the disruption of workflow processes (Garrett & Danzinger, 2008).
In addition, most IM communications are neither initiated nor scheduled by the recipient, and therefore often results in disruption of current activity or workflow processes on the part of the recipient. What’s more, companies using the IM protocol to dismiss employees may find themselves being accused of wrong termination in the absence of necessary precautions (Greengard, 2003).
Communications Best Suited for IM
Due to security concerns, highly sensitive communications should be reserved for other communication channels rather than IM unless the organization has the capacity to encrypt the texts or use a secure IM platform (Greengard, 2003).
However, other forms of communications such as customer feedback, employee sensitization and awareness, company notices, strategies and advice, sales and order requests, advertisements, employee collaboration, and human resource decisions can be communicated via IM (Huang & Yen, 2003).
This is in line with the numerous activities supported by IM such as multi-tasking, informal communications for effective collaboration in the workplace, coordination and scheduling of work-related tasks, organizing short-notice meetings, and social networking with friends and family (Nardi et al., 2000).
Recommendations
M&M’s takes cognizance of the fact that enhanced communication between management and employees on the one hand and between management and customers on the other is of fundamental importance in assisting the company to drive its success story into the 21st century (M&M Website, 2010).
As such, it is recommended that the organization takes a bold step towards formalization of IM as a preferred communication platform especially in communicating general organizational policies to employees and receiving feedback from customers.
Available literature has revealed that the communication technology’s real-time functionality, simplicity of use, unique affordances, and rich presence (Greengard, 2003; Cameroon & Webster, 2005; Primeaux & Flint, 2004; & Rennecker et al., 2003) are key ingredients that are destined to drive M&M’s success story forward.
M&M’s greatly depend on its innovative employees to come up with new and enticing candies. To further drive the urge for employees to remain innovative, it is highly recommended for the company to fully adopt IM technology in the workplace so as to enhance interdepartmental collaboration and the development of new ideas.
Such a platform will indeed extend frameworks through which the management collaborates with customers to evaluate feedback, and hence develop mechanisms for improvement. According to IBM (2008), IM enhances informal and formal collaboration in the workplace.
Lastly, M&M’s should come up with ways of utilizing the interactive and immediacy capabilities of IM (Cameroon & Webster, 2005) by channeling its advertisements through the platform in efforts aimed at complimenting other mainstream media used by the company for advertisement purposes.
At M&M’s, it is not difficult to manage IM for optimal deployment since the company exercises an open door communication style that encourages open and independent decision making and responsibility at the individual level.
The organizational culture reverberates well with the wishes and aspirations of employees (M&M Website, 2010), and as such, it is almost a guarantee that employees will utilize the new technology for the betterment of the organization as well as for their own collaboration.
Chudoba et al (2005) argues that many organizations employ several communication technologies to ensure their communication needs are sufficiently met. This internet-based communication technology fits well within M&M’s existing frameworks of communication, which are also technology-based.
The company mostly utilizes email and telephone communications in the workplace, and satellite communications across geographical locations (Rehoboth, 2004). IM will not only serve in complimentary roles with email in inter-departmental communications, but can also substitute the use of telephones to communicate company policies and strategies to employees.
IM can be used to replace satellite communications in areas with network connectivity, further bringing down operational costs and enhancing both efficiency and productive capacities (IBM, 2008).
The successful implementation of IM technology in M&M’s can only be hindered by security and productivity concerns. As such, the CEO is allowed to introduce austerity measures aimed at curtailing the improper use of the technology by employees.
It is also the duty of the chief executive to develop a solid ICT team which will constantly look into ways through which the IM technology can be optimally used by the company and its employees without causing security vulnerabilities as demonstrated by Greegard (2003). As such, end-user security regulations must be introduced to successfully harness the power of IM.
The company should also introduce regulations aimed at informing the employees about the complimentary or substitute roles of IM vis-à-vis other existing platforms so that it is used for the purposes it is intended. This will go a long way in ensuring its success, while curtailing the potential drawbacks already discussed comprehensively in this report.
To submit the concluding remarks, it is a well known fact that the pursuit for instantaneous connections and enhanced communication has occasioned the adoption of a wide array of technologies purposely designed to speed up organizational activities (Cameroon & Webster, 2005). IM represents one of the most rapidly proliferating communications tools that are swiftly being adopted by global organizations.
A critical review of literature contained in this report demonstrates that corporate IM use is substantial and growing. Consequently, the most fundamental thing for M&M’s is to swing into action towards ensuring that policies and frameworks are put in place with the aim to holistically harness the power and communication capabilities offered by IM.
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