I'd say it likely is a culture problem, the first thing all our developers, project managers and engineers do when they get to work is login to the chat server. Everyone has their clients (mostly Adium with a few running Pidgin / Empathy) set to auto-join a couple of rooms, we have one called #devops that most people join and then one per major product that people may be working on.
The thing is that we prefer to communicate one to one on IM. Everyone logs into the chat server, but they don't use rooms as much. That's probably because everyone is in separate teams, and each team prefers different ways of communication.
