How do we prefer to communicate at work?

Ultimately, old fashioned face-to-face communication still emerges as essential for building trust, and delivering important or emotionally sensitive messages (Pentland, 2015). But getting people in the same room together can be almost impossible, especially in highly virtualised and globalised businesses. Inevitably, much of business today is conducted over digital communication channels.

Text-based communications — especially chat — tends to be a favourite for pure information exchange (Hickman & Davies, 2018). It is an easy way to get messages to a lot of people with minimal effort. But it’s difficult to convey much in terms of nuance and emotion in text, unless you pepper it with emoticons.

Text-based communications can also create excessive demands on the receivers of them. This is sometimes called “techno-overload” (Tarafdar et al., 2010). As technology makes us more productive and more efficient, things that used to take days now take minutes. This can create a sudden influx of demand on us, can lead managers to communicate more than is necessary (Davis, 2002) and get more information than they can process and use effectively (Fisher & Wesolkowski, 1999). We also tend to become increasingly unable to identify information that is actually useful, rather than spam.

This often results in us getting both tired and stressed, as well as working longer hours. The productivity benefits of agile and flexible working can potentially be displaced by the resulting pressure to keep on top of things. This “techno-invasion” (Tarafdar et al., 2010) can result in people feeling as if they are tethered permanently to work. They may leave the office, but they can’t leave the office behind.

Being “always on” can significantly impinge on family time. The “speed trap” of quick reflex responses has brought pressure to respond immediately. This belief tends to create a false sense of urgency, puts pressure on us to respond fast (with no time to think carefully about our responses) and means that we can spend more time reading and responding to it than actually getting any other work done.

This sense of urgency can have a negative impact on the quality of decision-making (Perlow et al., 2002). Speed and quality are two key variables when people make important decisions, and they often come into conflict. Fast decisions are not always ideal, but more decisions are, of necessity, being made quickly. Faster communication provides more information for decision-makers to use, but their decisions might lack detail or adequate consideration. Combine that with the inevitable shortening of attention spans and we get a shallow, 180-character elevator pitch style of communication. Worse still, key people may not respond in time and decisions are then made without their potentially critical input.

The cost to users is also a factor which needs to be considered. In order to communicate with others in the past there was a cost incurred by both the sender and receiver of information. This was in terms of effort and often financially as well. Today, people can send huge amounts of material to others quickly and with almost zero additional cost. It is easier than ever before to burden other people with a deluge of information that might be important but that they never see because of inbox overload.

The great thing — and the problem — with email is that it covers a kind of middle ground between other more instant forms of communication (chat, social media, telephone, meetings) and more traditional written communications like post (Newport, 2019). For one thing, you can communicate with a

The balanced communications diet for business 117 lot of people at a single click of the “send” key without the need for them to be there, or the niceties and small talk that frequently occur with more synchronous forms of communication, like the phone. The fact that it leaves an audit trail is also flagged as an advantage (Mieczakowski et al., 2011).

The demise of email has been long forecast, but old channels often stick around. It is gradually being eclipsed by chat, though. Chat is very much where it’s at in the consumer space — with the proliferation of messaging apps such as WhatsApp, WeChat and Facebook Messenger. Inevitably, many of these tools are being brought into the workplace (Hickman & Davies, 2018). Chat can have some advantages. It is short, easy and quick but, as a tool of mass distraction, it still has many of the same disadvantages as email.

Social media has also been mooted as the ultimate collaboration tool within enterprises. Its significant strength is that you don’t actually have to know who to contact in order to message them and it can cross organisational silos (and defy spam filters). Finding the right person to talk to without cc’ing the whole company is sometimes very difficult in the email universe.

However, social media also has similar weaknesses in terms of information overload and as a task interrupter, with some people reporting “stream stress” as they attempt to keep up on Twitter, Facebook. Yammer, Linkedln, Instagram and the multitude of other social tools. The danger is that we may just end up with a raft of emails being replaced with a stream of messages from multiple different sources.