Online chatting at work gets the thumbs up from bosses
工作时间网络聊天得到老板赞许
By Catherine Lawson Business reporter
Fancy（设想） being Facebook friends with your ****? Or being allowed to Snapchat（使用“阅后即焚”聊天） your colleagues during office hours?
Well, this kind of office-based social networking（人际网） is growing in popularity as a way of escaping the tyranny（***政） of corporate（公司的） email.
Businesses wanting to streamline（使简单化，把…做成流线型） internal communications are turning to chat apps（聊天应用） like Chatter, Slack and Yammer, as well as more established platforms like Facebook.
The market for enterprise social software, as it's called, will be worth more than $8bn (£5.3bn) by 2019, up from about $5bn now, according to research firm Markets and Markets.
Of course, we've had company intranets（内联网） for almost 20 years, but it's the mobile friendly nature of many messaging apps that is shaking up this space.
In January 2015, Facebook unveiled（揭示） its new business networking platform, Facebook at Work and has just launched an associated chat app, Work Chat.
The social networking giant, with its 1.5 billion users, seems to want to dominate（支配） the corporate market, as well as the private sphere.
Facebook has signed up（跟…签订合同） around 300 companies of varying sizes, including Heineken（喜力）, Lagardere（法国拉加代尔集团） and Hootsuite（互随）.
'Collaborative（协同的） culture'
By far the largest deal it's struck so far is with Royal Bank of Scotland（苏格兰皇家银行）, which announced in late October that following a successful pilot（导向） programme it will be rolling out Facebook at Work to all 100,000 employees in 2016.
But why?
Kevin Hanley, director of design at RBS says it's all about facilitating（使容易） collaboration between different arms（分支） of the business. Facebook at Work is "a key component（组件） in driving a more transparent, engaged, collaborative, culture," he says.
Sentiments echoed（随声附和） by Julien Codorniou, Facebook's director of global platform partnerships, who says the platform is more than just a means of communicating, it's a tool that drives productivity（生产率）.
"We fundamentally believe that a connected workplace is a more productive workplace," he says. "We want to connect three billion employees worldwide. All you need is a phone.
"We are giving everyone a voice（发言权）."
Facebook at Work functions in the same way as personal Facebook, and Mr Hanley says the familiarity（熟悉，不拘礼仪） explains its success at RBS.
"We're finding there is no steep learning curve or training required. That means the adoption rate（采用率） is much higher than previous attempts at doing something similar," he tells the BBC.
Add in the benefits of its mobile app, which frees employees from desk-based（基于桌面的） applications, and RBS has found the tool to be "immediately useable".
'Finger on the pulse'（把握脉搏或趋势）
One of the most compelling（引人入胜的） reasons to try these new ways of working is to find an efficient alternative（可供选择的事物） to the deluge（洪水，泛滥） of corporate emails, which, let's face it, can sometimes be overwhelming（势不可挡的，巨大的）.
Accounting software firm（财务软件公司） Sage（赛捷） implemented online communications portal（入口） Chatter into its business in April 2015.
Sandra Campopiano, the firm's chief people officer（首席人力官）, says 9,000 topics have already been moved off email into "direct, snappy（容易的，仓促的） messages, or open, engaging（吸引人的，迷人的） groups and forums."
"We want our people to use channels that feel natural to them and which help them to be collaborative," she says.
"So social has to be one of the options, particularly in a tech company（科技公司） where so many of our colleagues are digital by nature（天生地）."
Andy Jankowski, founder of Enterprise Strategies（战略）, a corporate communications firm, explains that the value of these new enterprise social networks（企业社交网） (ESNs) lies in this ability to make communications more natural and conversational（双向的）.
"They allow employees to comment, ask clarifying questions or share experiences in support of the messages being communicated," he says.
"Communicating via an internal social network enables you to have a finger on the pulse of the organisation."
The death of email?
But do these new ways of communicating really spell（拼写，导致，意味着） the end for the work email?
Critics of the venerable platform say it is essentially a one-way method of communication. Senders often have no effective way of knowing if the contents of their messages are relevant or understood. And recipients waste time sifting（筛分，审查） through emails they don't need to see.
"Email overload is a common phenomenon（现象） in many corporations, resulting in employees simply not reading all that they receive," says Mr Jankowski.
"This creates an environment where employees are often out of the loop because of the emails they have not read."
Move conversations off email onto a social network where people can opt in or out（决定加入或决定撤出） and you have a fast-moving, visible means of sharing information and solving problems, they argue.
While Mr Jankowski thinks email is still the best way to communicate with one person or a small group, he agrees that the end of the companywide broadcast email may be nigh.
Ms Campopiano says "we may eventually see [email] die out（灭绝）, just like the fax."
A waste of time?
But surely receiving endless message alerts（提醒，警报） and conversation updates can become highly distracting（注意力分散的） in the work environment and lead to lower, not higher, productivity?
Won't we all be swapping（交换） cat（寻欢） videos?
Quite the reverse（正相反）, argue Mr Hanley and Ms Campopiano: the ability to opt-out（不参加） of irrelevant conversations actually frees up（释放） time.
And Mr Codorniou says that while employees access Facebook at Work up to 50 times a day, the conversations are all about work.
In fact, Mr Jankowski believes that the data harvested by all this social network activity could prove very useful for businesses.
"We already use social network analysis with social media（社交媒体） to make marketing decisions," he says. "What if we could harness the collective（集体的） brainpower（脑力） of all employees to make better business decisions based on conversations and insights（洞察力） being shared across our internal social network?"
Security concerns（顾虑）
One issue that may make firms think twice（三思） about adopting social media-style apps（应用） for internal communications, however, is data security - where, and how securely, is your ESN provider（供应商） storing all these potentially sensitive（敏感的） corporate conversations?
The EU's rescinding（废除） of the Safe Harbour agreement means firms can't assume（假定，认为） US-based service providers are offering adequate privacy protections（隐私保护）.
If it's in the US, would you be happy for the US government to get its hands on（染指） them, invoking（援引） the Patriot Act（爱国者法案）?
That's something to chat about - offline probably.
