Learn how to create a collaborative digital work environment, organize your work chat, and apply chat best practices for effective team communication.
Workplace chat apps are essential for communicating with people across your organization, whether they’re in the cubicle next to you or in another time zone. Real-time messaging platforms create a collaborative atmosphere where employees can chat one-to-one or in groups and freely exchange information outside of scheduled meetings and calls.
Most work chat apps are straightforward to use, making it easy to send a message to a colleague or start a group channel without much experience or training. But when you dig into additional features like AI capabilities and organization tools, work chat can transform how you communicate. It provides a central, organized space for effective collaboration, one where you can easily search through conversations and files to find the information you need, and keep team members in the loop on projects large and small.
If you’re new to business chat, here’s a guide to help you learn the ins and outs of basic chat organization and etiquette. We’ll explore:
Whether your team is fully remote, hybrid, or in person, employees today often find themselves collaborating with colleagues who aren’t in the same location. An organized work chat space helps bridge that distance and fosters effective team collaboration. Here’s how to create a productive environment in your Zoom Chat app.
A chat channel typically refers to a group chat space in a messaging app like Zoom Chat, Slack, or Microsoft Teams. Channels can be created to bring people together around a specific topic of discussion. As such, we recommend creating clear naming conventions for channels to make them easily identifiable and searchable. For example, using prefixes like “proj-” for project channels or “team-” for team-specific discussions helps everyone find what they need more easily.
Creating specific channels for different groups and teams across the organization helps build a sense of community while keeping conversations focused and relevant.
You can differentiate these different types of channels using emojis and icons, so they’re easier to find in your chat list.
Shared spaces are a chat feature that enables teams to stay in sync more easily. In Zoom Chat, for example, you can create a shared space that encompasses several group channels that all members should have access to. Inviting a person to that shared space will automatically add them to all those group channels. This is helpful if you’re managing a team and want to onboard a new hire by adding them to the company-wide announcement channel, department-wide channel, and your team channel at one time. Not all chat apps have this feature, but it’s a useful way to maintain a list of essential channels for teams.
While things like channel names and shared spaces help keep the broader group organized, you can also create your own organizational structure using features like folders and starred items. Stars are often reserved for your most important channels, ones you refer to every day or want to open in an instant. You can create as many folders as you’d like to organize your chats into different categories — by department, by project, or social channels. In Zoom Chat, you can expand or collapse the view of those folders to maintain a neater space and focus on only the channels that you need to.
Along with organizing your chat space, developing a few essential ground rules or best practices for chat will help your team communicate with ease.
When setting up work chat channels, give them clear and descriptive names that help teammates easily locate conversations and find specific information like social groups, project updates, or support channels. Be sure to clearly define and communicate each channel’s purpose in the description to maintain focus and keep discussions on track.
Chat apps usually have features that allow you to control access to certain channels. When creating a channel that may include sensitive information such as confidential news, make it a private channel where only admins can add new members. Also, think about whether you want any member to be able to post messages, or only certain authorized individuals.
Along those lines, take note when adding people who aren’t in your organization to a channel, and the information they’ll have access to. You can usually control who can add external contacts and quickly view at a glance whether an external contact is present in the chat.
Status indicators show whether a contact is available, in a meeting, in a calendar event, or offline. Setting a status message gives team members even more insight into your availability. If you’re out sick, on vacation, or traveling for work, type up a message letting teammates know when you’ll return to manage expectations for response times. On the flip side, if you see that a colleague has a do-not-disturb status, try checking in later or scheduling your message for when you know they’ll be around.
Workplace chats are meant for efficient and instant communication, so be clear and concise with your messages to maintain effectiveness. Keep conversations organized by using threads for discussions, using @mentions to alert specific contacts within a channel, and avoiding unnecessary @all channel mentions to keep notifications to a minimum. When using Zoom AI Companion to compose chat messages in Zoom Chat, you can provide guidance on the length and tone to keep things short and to the point.
Using text formatting like bold, bullets, and headings makes your messages easy to scan and understand. This improves readability and helps important information stand out. When sending a resource, such as a link, file, image, or video, be sure to give it a title and indicate what the resource includes — this makes it easier for people to find it using the search function.
Work chat channels help avoid unnecessary meetings and move projects along faster. They’re great for keeping teammates informed, asking quick questions, brainstorming ideas, and sharing relevant information or resources. However, it’s just as important to know when to move more complex discussions to phone calls or virtual meetings. Zoom AI Companion can help with this — from the side panel in Zoom Workplace, just ask when you and your colleague are available and it can find times and dates, and even schedule the meeting for you.
Keep your chat space tidy and efficient with regular cleanup activities. Archiving old channels and creating folders to organize direct messages and channels makes information easier to find and reduces digital clutter. With Zoom’s customizable sidebar, you can choose which tabs are at your fingertips and hide the rest for a neater view.
Evaluating chat apps often involves comparing a laundry list of features. But the truth is, more features don’t always make for a better experience — it’s all about how employees use the features to make their chat communications more effective. Here are the features that can make the biggest difference in your day.
While a strong work chat culture encourages real-time collaboration, it can also lead to a lot of unread messages. Cut down on the time it takes to catch up with an AI tool like Zoom AI Companion, which can summarize unread messages in Zoom Chat. You can manually ask AI Companion to do this if you have a particularly busy day, or set up an automatic workflow that pulls unread chats into a daily briefing in Zoom Canvas. AI Companion can also summarize whole documents straight from the chat window without you having to open the file. After you have your summary, ask AI Companion to identify action items or create a meeting agenda or project doc based on the information.
Get greater flexibility with an app that’s optimized for both desktop and mobile experiences. The ability to easily manage notifications allows for seamless communication regardless of where team members are working, and you can use AI Companion to compose a response even from your mobile app.
A workplace chat app needs accessible user management capabilities to add new team members as your organization grows. Look for external collaboration features that allow internal team members to work with contacts outside the organization while maintaining appropriate access controls.
Chat apps that allow you to upload files or share links to documents elevate their status from messaging tool to collaboration space. Zoom Chat, for example, makes it easy to upload files from Dropbox, Google Drive, and more, and link to collaborative documents like Zoom Canvas. These shared files then become searchable in Zoom Chat so you can find and resurface the info when needed. Chat channels also have a resources tab where you can pin relevant docs, files, and links for easy access.
When you have access to all group communication apps in one platform, it can help you work more efficiently. Integration capabilities with popular tools and custom options, combined with unified communications features, create a seamless workflow by connecting your workplace chat with other business applications. When you’re chatting with a team member in Zoom Chat, for instance, you can use integrations to create a Google Doc or share an issue in Jira, without leaving your chat app.
Using chat for business means sensitive information is often shared over messages. Comprehensive security settings and compliance features, including data encryption, access controls, and retention policies, help enable you to protect sensitive communications and comply with specific industry regulations.
Zoom Chat, our work chat solution for the Zoom platform, combines AI-first capabilities with a familiar, intuitive user experience and advanced collaboration features to streamline day-to-day communications and facilitate teamwork.
Zoom Chat works with AI Companion alongside your Zoom Workplace communication and productivity tools, like Zoom Meetings, Phone, Docs, and Whiteboard. It’s designed to facilitate better collaboration through organized group chats, while also making it simple to move between different communication channels in a single app. Features include:
Zoom Chat’s sidebar navigation delivers more control over tab-level badging and notifications, so you’re not overwhelmed by notifications or scrolling endlessly to find a channel. Zoom Chat also offers more advanced filtering and sorting capabilities, with the unique ability to drag, drop, and pin tabs.
Zoom Chat lets you schedule or start a Zoom meeting directly from a channel, making it easy to bring together all channel participants for a video discussion.
Zoom’s “continuous meeting chats” are dedicated group chats for meeting participants (both scheduled and ad-hoc meetings). They allow you to share resources and meeting agendas with everyone before a meeting, chat in real time during a meeting, and continue conversations after the meeting ends. AI Companion-generated meeting summaries are sent directly to the continuous meeting chat so everyone can stay aligned. If an invited participant misses the meeting, they can visit the continuous meeting chat to read the summary and get caught up.
Shared spaces eliminate the issue of having to manually add every team member to every channel. Simply add all the channels related to your project to a shared space, and team members in the shared space will automatically get access to those channels.
Zoom Chat fully supports threaded conversations on channels, 1:1, and in-meeting chat, which helps you and others organize conversations so you can follow them more easily.
Zoom AI Companion helps you streamline workflows so you can get more done. Share AI-generated meeting summaries and next steps in a chat channel, catch up on group messages with AI Companion summaries, and ask AI Companion to draft messages for you.
Zoom Chat is a part of Zoom Workplace, which means you have access to all your communication, collaboration, and productivity tools in one app. From video conferencing to cloud phone calls, you can start or schedule time with team members right from your workplace chat app. Plus, Zoom Chat allows you to communicate asynchronously with features like voice messages, screen recording, scheduled messages, reminders, and more.
Zoom Chat is included with all Zoom Workplace plans with no additional costs or contracts required. Looking to switch from your existing chat app? See how Zoom Chat compares to Slack and Microsoft Teams.
*Zoom AI Companion is available with eligible paid Zoom Workplace plans. May not be available for all regions or industry verticals.
