In what feels like another world, it used to be that business people would have face-to-face conversations. If a meeting couldn’t be set up, a phone call was second best. Now it’s different. Most of the calls you receive are from robots trying to sell you a car warranty.
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Compared to Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers, Millennials and Gen-Zs are generally not as fond of picking up a phone to talk and prefer sending a text, email or posting on Slack. It makes sense as it’s a quick and efficient way of communication. You also don’t need to deal with the social awkwardness and discomfort of sitting in front of a boss or colleague.
There may be something to be said about the old-school style of communications at work. New research from the Florida International University College of Business shows that you may want to consider holding off exclusively depending upon technologies.
The data gleaned from the study, published in the March 2022 issue of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, finds that “excessive use of text-based communication—including email and instant messaging—for complex tasks such as negotiating, decision-making or problem-solving, can lower a person’s interest and performance on work started after the conversation is finished.”
Ravi Gajendran, the FIU Business associate professor of global leadership and management who ran the study said about the results, “Negotiating or working together to solve a problem is more difficult over email or instant messenger than working in person because text-based communication limits visual, vocal, and nonverbal cues.”
Gajendran, whose areas of research expertise include remote work, virtual teams, impacts of communication technology, leadership, and human capital development, added, “The absence of these cues means that text-based communication takes longer and requires more thought to arrive at a shared understanding. You have to think about what you’re writing, to make sure it’s not misinterpreted.”
Researchers conducted several tests to determine which styles work best. Those who did not use text-based communication performed better than the people who used the technology. Gajendran explained that the results could be attributed to “the overuse of email or instant messaging tools,” as the situation warranted “thinking and leading.” Some things still need a human-to-human conversation.
According to Gajendran, the “Findings suggest that communicators need to be aware that using text-based communication media such as email for convergence tasks can be tiring. As a result, they may not have the energy required to effectively deal with subsequent tasks requiring complex reasoning (e.g., writing a report) they may work on after they finish communicating.”
He explained that “using text-based communication relative to meeting in person to work on convergence processing tasks involves greater communication difficulty and is therefore more depleting,” and “Employees must carefully weigh the costs of using text-based communication for convergence tasks with the costs of meeting in person.”
It is not just emails and texts. The remote work revolution has launched an overwhelming array of tech apps to keep workers in touch while in the office or at home. Your company may deploy Slack, Asana, Basecamp, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Dropbox, and an assortment of other platforms. The tools, while well-intentioned, push people to switch their focus from being productive to staying connected, creating the stress of presentism.
Erica Dhawan, in a Harvard Business Review piece, points out a survey of almost 2,000 office workers that highlights challenges with digital communications. The results of the study showed that more than 70% of respondents experienced some form of unclear communication from their colleagues.
Dhawan concluded that this leads to the average employee wasting hours each week on “poor or confusing digital communications, which adds up to an average annual amount of $188 billion wasted across the American economy.” It also caused “missed deadlines, emails ignored, reports of uncomfortable chat room conversations, and a lot of peer-based passive-aggressiveness.”
There were other interesting results, including the anxiety induced by all the different notifications, “most notably from a barrage of emails.” Dhawan noticed that all these different types of tech communication apps created chaos. For example, she cited that workers were sharing the same messages and documents using multiple collaboration tools, causing havoc for employees to know where to go to see their alerts.
Sometimes a quick phone call, popping in an office, or chatting in the hallway can be highly productive and less stressful than juggling emails, texts and an array of communication tools, apps and platforms.
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