A survey from Siemens Business Group suggests that IM has had a marked impact on how employees do their jobs. For example, Eighty-four percent of employees working in IT make fewer phone calls thanks to IM; 76% send fewer e-mails. Nearly 80% of these employees assert that IM has improved their productivity. The same number are employed by companies that encourage the use of IM as a productivity tool.

The Siemens study focuses on the benefits IM brings to the workplace, while a META Group study looked at drawbacks, including employees’ personal use of IM. A post on InfoWorld’s blog by Tom Sullivan takes issue with META Group’s conclusion that companies need to control IM:

Security issues aside, regulating IM will not stop employees from reaching out to friends and family, it will only make it harder for them, cost the company more in phone calls and, because IM is more efficient than either e-mail or the phone, result in lost time that should be spent working.

I’ll not pretend that IM never gets abused; sure it does. But so does e-mail and so do phones. Of the three, though, IM is the least time-consuming.

Any way you look at it, employees need a balance between their personal and professional lives. Sometimes they absolutely have to make personal arrangements while they are at work, and sometimes they don’t actually have to, but do so anyway.

That said, it is better to give employees the tools to make personal communications as proficiently as possible than it is to take away today’s most efficient means of one-to-one communication.