Think People Understand Your Texts? Think Again☺

Communication is a contact sport

Those of us who care about communication accuracy in the workplace—which should be all of us—cringe at the idea of using something like Facebook or Twitter to communicate with co-workers. We look at how those platforms in particular get abused outside of business and can’t imagine a corporate world where communication is based on, say, 140 characters or a posting free-for-all. So we stick to what we know best—email, instant messaging, and texting—for internal communication.

And yet, in our own text-based corporate communications, we make the same mistakes you see in social media: deliberately terse emails or IMs, rudeness, and tone deafness. The problem isn’t textual tools themselves, but how we use them in today’s fast-paced, often impersonal, business environment. We are so used to being tethered to our tech that we’ve lost the fine skill of communication. Quality Digest publisher Mike Richman and I were discussing this issue the other day via, what else, instant messaging.

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Comments

Interesting article

You've echoed a lot of my own observations here, and done an excellent job of summarizing the problem. One thing I've had to be careful of since the advent of email is irony...irony doesn't work nearly as well in writing as it does in speaking...the cues are too often not there. Your "you know how I hate doing this job" could be an example of that. I think you make a great point about emojis, too...they can put a different twist on the statements. It's a simple experiment; if you write that hate-job statement several times and put different emojis next to each one, you can see the difference it makes.

I loved Mike's observation. It would be worth trying to come up with some measure for success in communications (there are probably some out there in the literature), and try sending the same messages through several different media all at different distances from a human, and then plot the data. My guess is that it's probably (as Mike conjectured) something that resembles an inverse proportional relationship.