3 Reasons Why Text Messaging Makes a Poor Business Tool

Do you have what it takes to win the annual National Texting Championship? 17-year-old Austin Wierschke has the texting speed, dexterity, and accuracy to be crowned the most recent texting champion, an accomplishment accredited to sending 500 texts a day for training! This is a major achievement for young Alex, but does it translate to a hirable skill?

 National champions usually make a nice asset to your team, but a texting champion may not be good for your office environment. As convenient as texting is, it lacks what businesses need in a communications solution. Here are three reasons why texting should not be used for work.

Before we reveal the three reasons, just to be clear, we're not saying that a text message should never be sent in your office. It's likely that every cell phone user in your workplace is a texter. Employees should be allowed to text as many text messages as they need to for personal reasons. Instead, we're referring to text messages being used for work purposes, like on projects and staff-to-staff communications.

Texting is Too Familiar
Text messaging has a negative stigma associated with it that's not helped by the fact that texting has developed its own SMS language made up of abbreviations and misspellings. If someone is unfamiliar with what abbreviations like TTYL and L8R mean, then they will have to waste time searching the Internet to decipher the code, thus eliminating the time-saving purpose of SMS language.

Additionally, a professionally trained business man or woman may feel insulted upon receiving such a dumbed-down message. This is because a professional worker is educated and their degree will cover important areas like grammar. Using proper English with educated people is a professional courtesy that shows them you value their education, and that you are educated yourself. This may be why SMS messaging with poor grammar is prevalent among teenagers because they have yet to go through the demands of a college education where a mastery of the English language is required.

Texting Undermines a Unified Workplace Communications Strategy
When it comes to workers communicating about work-related projects, it's good to standardize how employees share details about the projects for workflow and accountability purposes. If a worker strays from a traceable email discussion about a project by texting the client a question from their personal phone, then you have no way to track that communication and the rest of the team may continue working on the project without any knowledge of an important detail that was personally exchanged via text message.

Personal Text Messages are Difficult to Track and Archive
One reason that email is still preferred in office environments over text messaging and other alternative communication tools like social media is because you can easily print an email for accountability and legal purposes. Printing and even accessing an employee's personal device to retrieve a client communication can be a difficult and sticky situation if you don't already have the legalities hashed out with a solid BYOD policy.

A well thought out and articulate email is still the preferred way to do business. It may take extra time to use complete sentences, but it's worth it when your company's reputation is on the line. Another solid solution that the avid texters in your office will appreciate is to provide them with an instant messaging program they can use from their phones just like a text. If you set this solution up through your company, then you will be able to control the account by viewing and managing all employee messages.

Directive can provide your business with an instant messaging solution like this built for your business by installing VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). VoIP is the ultimate unified workplace communications solution because it utilizes your company's Internet lines for instant messaging, phone, video conferencing, and more at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional phone plans. To learn more about VoIP and other great communications solutions that will help streamline your operations, give Directive a call at 607.433.2200.