Making the Most Out of Your Written Chat
As new means of communicating with employees are constantly evolving and multiplying, conducting written chats emerges as a clear “low involvement, high reward” method. It’s both very impactful for employees who can freely express themselves, sometimes even in a fully anonymised setting, and rather easy to conduct for managers when it comes to having the right tech and helps to set it up.
What does a written chat entail exactly? How to manage it as best as possible? Here’s our checklist for a successful written chat.
What is a written chat?
The chat is a defined moment when employees can freely address messages to managers in a public forum. For it to work well, managers have to be accessible and ready to reply in the moment. It is often set up on a platform dedicated to the use case, as no traditional means of communicating at work is suited for it (image running a Q&A session by email, or on a professional social network… it can quickly get messy!).
The goal is to give all employees an outlet to express themselves freely, and for managers to easily answer.
The key defining elements of a successful written chat
Before the written chat:
- Prepare themes in advance to easily categorise them when the session is live, and to provide topics for discussion
- To have a system in place to differentiate answered and unanswered questions
During the chat:
- Take questions in written form, and reply to them in writing as well. This ensure you to have solid content to share afterwards, because…
- Keeping track of discussions is paramount to maximise the impact of the chat
- Choose a solution where content si easily reusable and can be exported, for data analysis and reusing questions and answers after the chat
After the chat:
- Do a questionnaire to poll satisfaction et/ou knowledge in the end of the chat, this is even more useful when doing a series of chat scattered over time.
- Share the chat’s key information (most important questions/answers, key number, stats etc) on your intranet or professional social network.
With the Activity Report, Wisembly allows you to share key numbers and information from any Wisembly-run event in a few clicks.
The indicators of a successful live chat
Visible during the event:
- Number of messages and questions sent
- Importance of the messages, often correlated with the number of reactions each message provoked
Visible after the event:
- Comprehension and memorisation of the content shared and discussed. Your communication is only effective if it’s well understood!
- Satisfaction on the chat. Gradually improve your efforts by closely looking at this feedback on every chat.
This two elements are drawn directly from the satisfaction and knowledge quizz that you should run to conclude your chatting sessions.
This checklist should help you run a flawless written live chat that’ll benefit everybody! But remember: place your collaborators first. The written chat’s main purpose is to answer their questions in a clear manner. Its impact will be even greater if you can share a summary – or even its full content – to your collaborators once the chat is over, including those who didn’t join in on the discussions when they were live.
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