In these heady days of instant messaging, cellphones, teleconferencing, PDF downloads and much more, what has become of good old face-time spoken conversation?
Communication specialist Loren Ekroth poses this question before reminding us that the human being is, after all, a social animal hard-wired for personal contact, after which he makes some fascinating predictions regarding the immediate future of human conversation.
Good old conversation? Well, among the many technological advances that are threatening to crowd out the more intimate forms of interpersonal communication, pride of place surely goes to good old email!
As a medium of communication, email is surely unparalleled for sheer convenience, but it carries many pitfalls and even dangers, especially in the work environment. We have several excellent articles on the site clarifying the right and wrong ways to use email and explaining why the email messages you send can even sabotage your career!
Until fairly recently, most of the focus on the negative side of email in the workplace has focused on such aspects as email overload, sloppy grammar and spelling and similar things that will reflect poorly on your professional image, the damage and embarrassment caused when messages land up in the wrong hands, or the need to consider the legal implications of what you put in writing.
However, all this could be just the tip of the iceberg.
Some years ago, Albert Mehrabian, psychology professor at UCLA, came up with this classic statistic for the effectiveness of spoken communications:
- Only 7% of meaning is in the words that are spoken.
- 38% of meaning is paralinguistic - the way the words are said (verbal inflections).
- 55% of meaning is in facial expression and body language.
One writer who was quick to realize the implications of the above figures for email is Ron McMillan, co-author of Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, who points out that email can be the kiss of death when it is used to communicate anything sensitive, important or complicated.
He was able to see this for himself while spending 10,000 hours observing how companies communicate. Every day, millions of messages arrive in inboxes without the rich stew of nonverbal information - tone of voice, facial expressions, body stance, eye gaze - that we typically rely on to figure out what someone really means.
Why, asks McMillan, are managers and employees relying on email for nuanced conversations which really should be handled face-to-face (or as a poor second but still better, voice-to-voice)?
No small wonder that, according to the feature I pointed to above in this month’s Inc. Magazine, employees of at least one company are banned from using email and the like if they plan to criticize one another. And no wonder that the CEO of another has dedicated one day per week as “no email” day.
From Monday to Thursday at Roberts Golden Consulting in san Francisco, email remains the primary form of communication - whether with colleagues, clients, or suppliers. But every Friday, president Sara Roberts, who believes that too much email only makes it harder to build rapport, reminds her staff to give their keyboards a rest.
“People hide behind e-mail,” she laments. “For just one day a week, I want us to pick up the phone or talk to someone face-to-face.”
For as Roberts firmly believes, in a wired world, it’s worth remembering that there’s still no technology more powerful than the meeting of minds.
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