Why they exist and why they work
Start by admitting the obvious: they work. The message lands, it gets read in five minutes, and people reply. No corporate tool bought in a board meeting manages that in its first month.
And they work because they meet the two conditions almost no alternative meets: it is on the phone the person already has in their hand, and there is nothing to sign up to. If your alternative does not meet both, people will be back in the group within a week.
So the question is not how to ban them. Banning does not work: all you achieve is a group with the managers no longer in it, which is worse for everybody. The question is what has to come out of it.
The four real problems
01
Everybody's personal phone number
A phone number is personal data. When the company organises a group, it is processing that data and it is also making it visible to every other member, which is not the same as holding it on a file. You need to be able to say what your lawful basis is and what the person was told.
02
Working time
The message arrives at eleven at night and the phone goes off. It can be muted, but the expectation that it gets read is still there, and that expectation is the whole of the argument about out-of-hours contact.
03
There is no usable record
A message read by thirty people evidences nothing: not who received it, not when, and not which version of the document was going round. The day you need the proof, it is not there.
04
The history walks out with whoever leaves
The group lives on the supervisor's phone. When that person moves site or leaves the company, they take the whole channel with them and it has to be rebuilt from scratch.
There is a fifth, less obvious and fairly corrosive: whatever gets decided in the group does not exist for anybody who is not in it. People on a day off, on sick leave, or who have just joined miss agreements that are later treated as common knowledge.
Can you require somebody to be in the group?
This question arrives sooner or later, usually when somebody refuses to hand over their number. We are not going to settle it here, because it depends on your agreements, your internal policy and the specific case, and this is not legal advice. What can be said is which framework you have to look at.
Requires every processing of personal data to rest on one of the lawful bases the Article lists, and sets the conditions under which each applies.
Sets the conditions for consent: it must be freely given, the controller must be able to demonstrate that it was given, and withdrawing it must be as easy as giving it. The ICO's employment guidance notes that consent is rarely a suitable basis in an employment relationship, because of the imbalance between employer and worker.
Set out daily and weekly rest: an uninterrupted rest period of not less than eleven hours in each 24-hour period, and 24 hours in each seven-day period. There is no separate statutory right to disconnect in UK law, so what is expected outside working hours is whatever your policy and your contracts say.
What has to come out of the group, and what can stay
| Type of message | Where it should be |
|---|---|
| 'Can anybody swap my Saturday?' | Can stay. That is colleagues sorting things out between themselves |
| 'We're starting at 6 tomorrow, not 7' | Company channel: it affects working time and needs a record |
| Photo of the new rota | Company channel, in its proper place and in the right version |
| A safety procedure as a PDF | Company channel, with a read receipt |
| 'The one on line 3 is broken, don't use it' | Company channel, segmented to that line |
| Congratulations, photos from the Christmas do, memes | Leave them. That is the glue holding the team together |
The line is easy to explain in a supervisors' meeting: if what you are about to send affects working time, safety or pay, it does not go in the group. Everything else, wherever you like.
How to make the switch without banning anything
01
Do not announce that the groups are over
Announce where the rota is going to live from now on. One specific place, one specific thing, and something people genuinely need.
02
Move what people go looking for first
Rota, the working-time calendar, payslips, shift swaps. Once those are only on the new channel, people come in on their own. Institutional announcements can follow later.
03
Supervisors in, and allowed to publish
If a supervisor has to ask head office for permission before flagging a breakdown, they will carry on using the group, and rightly so. Give them publishing rights on their own site.
04
Leave the group alone
Once the important things are somewhere else, the group settles into what it should always have been: colleagues coordinating, and jokes. That is nobody's problem.
An honest warning about timescales: this takes two to three months to bed in, and during that period the two channels will run alongside each other. Anybody promising you the workforce abandons the group in a fortnight has never rolled this out on a production site.
What about replacing WhatsApp with a company chat?
You can, and plenty of internal communication tools include chat. But it is worth going in with your expectations calibrated: a corporate chat is competing with an app people already have open all day, and that is a hard comparison.
Where it clearly wins: when somebody needs to write to a colleague on another site whose number they do not have, or when the conversation has to stay inside the company. Where it does not win: informal day-to-day coordination between people who see each other in the changing room.
Our recommendation, and it goes against our own commercial interest: start with the noticeboard and the documents, which is where the problem is real and the improvement is obvious. Chat, if you want it, gets switched on afterwards, once people are already coming in of their own accord.