Monthly Archives: March 2018

WhatsApp’s increasing popularity (1.5 billion active users at the end of 2017) means it is being used more and more in a work environment, as well as for personal messaging.

Group messaging can be useful in a work environment – the informality can be more accessible and supportive, and thereby potentially more productive than the more formal tone that email tends to engender. Easy sharing of documents and photos is also useful when many are not constantly at a fixed desk.

But while informal workplace chats can be informative, they are also risky. Users may find themselves overloaded by the volume of messages, and excluded if they cannot keep up. Productivity may well suffer as users put their efforts into monitoring the flow of messages rather than focusing on tasks at hand.

Confusion can stem from the fact that most see WhatsApp as a personal or leisure service, and a professional approach isn’t necessarily carried over when the same service is used in the workplace. The vast majority do not start out using WhatsApp as a tool for business.

WhatsApp’s core features can be both good and bad at work. Delivery and read receipts can be handy to ensure someone has received and furthermore actually read a message, but this is also intrusive. Especially as we all struggle to maintain a sensible work/life balance in the current era of constant communication. In this scenario, the power is in the hands of the sender, and this can be exploited in a workplace hierarchy. (It is important to note that these features can be disabled per user, but does this hamstring the service somewhat?)

The expectation of when employees are actually working and available to communicate does vary across industries and organisations. The immediacy of WhatsApp can also be an issue in this aspect, as it quickly makes a grey area of working hours and when someone should be available.
Legally speaking, WhatsApp provides scope for breaching employer guidelines and data protection laws. And in light of this, immediately becomes another medium for organisations to monitor. Many banks, including Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, have banned WhatsApp and other IM communication tools on work mobile devices for exactly these reasons.

In the end, it comes down to the culture of an organisation and what practices are fostered. Many breaches are down to human error rather than technological – therefore one could argue that such risks are still present regardless of the services/tools being utilised. If WhatsApp can benefit you then make use of it. Just bear in mind and protect against the potential pitfalls, especially in regards to data protection and expectations of users.

We recommend using a different service in order to distinguish between work and personal activities. There are many excellent tools available to facilitate instant communications and remote working, including:

• Slack
• Microsoft Teams
• Yammer
• Skype for Business
• Google Hangouts
• Cisco Spark
• Hive
• Fuze
• Glip
• HipChat
• Jabber
• Salesforce Chatter

The tool that will serve you best is likely something that is available via or integrates with your existing platform(s). For example, if you use Office 365, then Microsoft already provides services as part of this which could work (e.g. Yammer and Skype for Business).

To learn more about workplace communications, team platforms and data protection considerations when using these, please be in touch with us via [email protected].

Today is International Women’s Day and the theme this year is, ‘#PushForProgress’ in areas such as gender parity in all industries and society worldwide. Started by the Suffragettes in the early 1900’s, the first International Women’s Day was celebrated in 1911.

With the World Economic Forum’s 2017 Global Gender Gap Report findings telling us that gender parity is over 200 years away – there has never been a more important time to be mindful of this statistic and to push for progress for gender parity.

An interesting story today on the #PushForProgress theme is of UN Women tweeting about the global #WikiGap event, organised in partnership with the Swedish Foreign Ministry. The idea is to get more women contributing to the website, to address the gender imbalance on the world’s largest online and user-generated encyclopaedia.

Knowledge is powerful, and Wikipedia has the potential to shape our view of the world. But there is a major imbalance between men and women on the website that should be highlighted.

They have found that 90 percent of the people who add content to Wikipedia are men and there are four times more articles about men than women. The figures vary regionally, but the picture is clear: there is significantly less information on women and less information contributed to the website by women.

#WikiGap is an event today, on Internation Women’s Day, where people around the world will gather to add more content to Wikipedia about women figures, experts and role models in various fields.

International Women’s Day belongs to everyone and with the past year’s strong global momentum striving for gender parity, hopefully, there will be even more positive changes for both men and women for the near future.

We are pleased to now be an approved and recommended Solutions Provider by Microsoft!

As a Microsoft certified solution provider, we specialise in providing up to date Microsoft technology based customer solutions all over the world.

Our Microsoft expertise is in the following areas:

If you are interested in discussing any of the listed Microsoft services and learning how we can assist you, please be in touch — [email protected].