Words Matter Is Your Digital Communication Style Impacting Your Employees? - Samantha Rae Ayoub, Fellow

This resource first appeared in issue #87 on 14 Aug 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals, Managing A Team: Other, Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools, Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing

Words Matter: Is Your Digital Communication Style Impacting Your Employees? - Samantha Rae Ayoub, Fellow

“We need to talk”. “Fine.” These all messages or responses that would be very uncomfortable for us to receive from our boss; but when things are busy it’s pretty easy for us to communicate in exactly that way with our team members or peers. Your boss (probably) isn’t a jerk, and neither are you, but when we have a lot of things on our mind it’s easy to not pay attention to how our words might seem.

In this article, Ayoub councils us to routinely put a tiny bit of effort into written and to some extent even video communication with our team members:

• Put yourself in their shoes - how will this be received? This is really easy to understand with a moment’s effort: before you hit send just read the message over imagining it was coming from your boss.
• Mind the punctuation - a little “!” goes a long way to a “Thanks” or other message
• Always respond - even if just to say that you read the message
• Practice CATTE - make sure your response gives Context, Answer to the question, Timeline (does this need to be done now or is it for a week from now?), Transparency, and some kind of Emotion
• Balance digital interactions - with whatever kind of face time is feasible

Of Ayoub’s recommendations, I’m personally the worst at always responding, even (especially) when I don’t have time to do anything about the message at the moment. I need to get better at that. I know for a fact that it makes my team members feel ignored (and why wouldn’t it?)

This stuff is especially important with us all being distant from each other. When we switched to everyone working from home, I started putting a lot more exclamation marks in my emails, started using emojis a lot more in Slack, and added a lot of gushing to positive feedback and compassionate (but still firm) tones to negative feedback.

You know how in silent films, it initially seems to modern eyes like the stars are overacting? Compared to today’s movies, they lacked an entire channel of communication - sound - and so they had to make up for it in expression and body movement. It’s not overacting, it was acting the appropriate amount to convey the intended meaning given the limitations of the medium.

It was initially uncomfortable and unnatural for me to emote that way in text. But written communications, unleavened by in-person interactions, is pretty limited. You have to “over” emote to effectively convey your intended meaning. Otherwise, people will imagine all kinds of things lurking behind your opaque words, and they are apt to latch onto the worst possibilities.