Laws of Digital Body Language: Communicate Carefully - Cor Scheepers - Consultant: Training, Learning & Performanace @ pm.ideas
Digital body language requires the mastery of a new way of communication. We need to understand the four laws of digital body language:
- Value Visibly
- Communicate Carefully
- Collaborate Confidently
- Trust Totally
This article will cover the second law: Communicate Carefully. It is about how we can use digital body language to find alignment.
Communicating Carefully involves making a continuous effort to minimize the risk of misunderstanding and misinterpretation by being as clear as possible in your words and digital body language. We should establish unambiguous expectations and norms about which channels we use, what we include in our messages, and whom we include on the recipient list. We know why each person copied on the message is accountable, and who is responsible for the next steps.
Communicating Carefully goes a long way towards eliminating confusion. It allows for a consistent understanding of each team member’s requirements and needs, helping to streamline communication and reduce inefficiencies in teamwork. All of this leads to alignment.
When there is no clear communications between silos in an organization, projects may be stopped at short notice because of unexpected legal issues, duplicated effort may be performed by different teams, and success or failure may be difficult to determine, as no agreement was reached om metrics of success. Legal teams or compliance officers may not have been included during the planning stages. Customers were not listened to. Key stakeholders did not get together to say: “Here is what I want, here is what I think, let us get on the same page.” If you do not define what success looks like, and you are not engaged in mutual validation, how do you know when you have succeeded? It is hard to reach a goal that is not clearly defined.
Communicating Carefully means that people have to agree on whether or not a given project is necessary and in sync with the organisation’s strategic objectives. It means keeping employees and teams informed and up-to-date, and the checking in constantly to support their efforts. Who is working on what, and why?
The biggest impediment to alignment is lack of clarity. Communicating Carefully restores that alignment through digital body language signals and cues – from realizing that a “brief” message is not always a “clear” one, to eliminating tone-deaf language, to everything in between. We Communicate Carefully by sending messages that say what we mean and state what we need – thereby eliminating frustrating ambiguity across teams.
When people communicate, without being aware of it, they make use of a broad range of “contextualization” cues that help others assess the meanings behind their words. For instance, the phrase “I love that film” accompanied by a head nod signals something entirely different from “I love that film” paired with an eye roll or a wink. We are all “immigrants” in today’s digital workplace, meaning that the subtle cues that help us understand what others may really be saying require time, patience, and even reflection.
Common complaints include “Our department has no common language” and “Nobody knows what our division is up to.” It frequently comes down to a major obstacle: no one is Communicating Carefully. Up to 80 percent of projects suffer from a lack of clarity and detail. A recent survey shows that 56 percent of strategic projects fail as a result of poor communication. In the United States of America alone, this adds up to a loss of $75 million for every $1 billion spent.
Managers may have the required people skills, however the lack of eye contact, tone of voice, or body language to clarify their intent, may lead to a wrong interpretation of the intended message. Their natural mode of engaging with colleagues may be well intended but off the mark in the digital age. They would need to be much clearer, needing to adjust their digital body language. Clarity trumps politeness and would also help their colleagues thrive. You need to change your feedback style to be more direct – even by including a bullet-pointed list of requests.
Once, people could clarify what others were saying by picking up on their physical reactions – a quizzical expression, a stunned stare, the hint of a smile. This still works in the real life, just not in the contemporary digital world. Even on video calls, there is a disconnect when you cannot tell if people are looking at their cameras or not, or you cannot quite gauge their expressions on the small participant boxes. Today, it is everyone’s responsibility to consider the potential ways our communications can be interpreted (or misinterpreted) and adjust our writing style and tone accordingly.
Communicating Carefully means putting out clear signals that keep everyone fully informed and aligned. It does not mean that everyone has to agree – which almost never happens – but it does mean that goals are understood and shared. When team members are genuinely aligned on objectives and expectations, this higher level of mutual understanding frees everyone up to being the best at what they do. Communicating Carefully means getting to the point while considering context, medium, and audience.
The speed and pace of change in most businesses today make Communicating Carefully even harder to implement. Company leaders used to spend months crafting a robust vision of strategic alignment before carefully communicating that vision over a face-to-face campaign aimed at investors, business units, and customers. Today, leaders need to disseminate information fast.
This means that people are expected to present their ideas in bullet points, using headlines as proxies for the ideas that support them. The universal chaos of unread emails, instant messages (IMs), texts, and calendar invites make most of us crave a simpler, easier era of phone calls, office drop-ins, and uninterrupted client dinners. Back then, a day could go by before you finally respond to a voicemail (Call Jack back, you would scrawl on a random piece of paper, which you would then lose). Communicating Carefully in today’s high-velocity, shorthand world demands a more concrete approach.
Communicate Carefully: The Principles
Many of us communicate most of the time with our thumbs (on mobile devices). We need new rules of thumb to help us communicate clearly and persuasively.
Think Before you Type. Once we press Send, we cede control on where our words end up. A private email you send to an acquaintance might show up later in a post on their public Facebook page. Messages and posts can be copied, forwarded, altered, and updated in ways that distort their fundamental meaning, not to mention translated instantly (and not always correctly) into almost any language. An email can show up from customer or client without us knowing that our boss’s boss is included as a Bcc.
All this means one thing: you need to be very careful. A former manufacturing executive sent his colleagues a twelve-paragraph email giving them a friendly heads-up about a possible future acquisition. Without his knowledge, two words from his long email were copied (out of context too) and widely forwarded across the organization: Expect Layoffs. A hospital administrator experienced the embarrassing and painful chaos that Reply All can create when she emailed the entire hospital staff with the latest draft of a controversial policy. Despite her best efforts to regain control, she spent the next week fielding Reply All feedback from eight hundred or so staff members.
Our fast-moving culture means that we do not always take the time we need to proofread or truly consider the words we have written before we hit Send. Today, reading an email before we send it (and not ten times after we send it) is mandatory. How often have you heard the words “But I sent you an email” or “Did you not get the email?” or “I am sure I covered that in the email” when you are staring directly at the email in question and the information just is not there?
The first rule of Communicating Carefully? Slow down.
Sometimes, people respond with just a burst of information (e.g., Yep, we did $457K for Feb!). The responder skipped over pleasantries, not even acknowledging a friendly greeting. It is easy to assume that suspending cognition before typing is a “younger person” thing, common to so-called digital natives. Research has shown that perpetrators of this particular crime of digital body language come in all ages and occupy all levels of organizations, including (and especially) executives, who are responsible for communicating so many messages that most settle for speed over clarity. The result is widespread confusion across teams.
A team had a low employee engagement score. Many team members reported feeling overwhelmed. They often worked on weekends and late at night. The manager realized two things: he had not created time boundaries around when his teams should communicate, and he was also guilty of sending emails at all hours. It was no surprise that his team felt they needed to be in touch 24/7. He made some specific changes. His team now knows that the manager writes and answers emails on weekend afternoons but does not expect a response until Monday morning. He even went the extra step of coining a new acronym, ROM, for “Respond on Monday.” This way, he does not have to wait to send the email (and risk forgetting it altogether), but his team still gets their weekend.
Be Tone-Deft, not Tone-Deaf. Tone – the overall attitude, or character, of a piece of writing – is another key component of Communicating Carefully. You should ask yourself: Who is the recipient? Who is the audience? What is the context here? You should tailor your communication accordingly, similar to making sure you “read the room.”
This means anticipating how your words are likely to come across to others. When you write, text, or call your boss or colleagues, it is best to keep your tone neutral until you develop a rapport that would indicate differently. Focus on being informative, or persuasive. Edit yourself so that you stick to the essential facts.
Offline, a loud tone of voice can convey emphasis (This matters!), serve as a switching signal (actually, this is the thing that matters), or express extreme feelings (I am furious!). A softer voice conveys “I do not know,” signals calm, or indicate that maybe it is time for someone else to speak. The good news is that you can also modify the tone of your digital voice.
Be aware of the visual impact of your message. Consider the following email message: THIS IS NOT GOOD, NEEDS A LOT OF WORK!!!! It sounds like Zeus ordering a hit on a lesser god – all caps, terse sentence structure, and a crazy picket fence of exclamation marks. If someone was trying to tear your head off, then mission accomplished. But if that same person was trying to convey respect, whoops!
A manager related an interaction with a senior leader that left him feeling unappreciated and belittled. As requested, he had sent this leader a detailed plan about increasing productivity. The plan set forth a different way of working that the manager was certain to help teams avoid duplicating their efforts while creating new levels of transparency. The manager was excited about the plan, and even included specific questions for the next team meeting. Expecting a positive response, maybe even a few follow-up questions, what he got back from the executive was this: k.
The manager felt confused and insulted. His proposal was clear and comprehensive. Was the executive even thinking about his plan – or was she dismissing it outright? Did k mean she was giving him the green light to proceed, or was it a subtle command to put his dumb ideas on a back burner? It was impossible to tell. Did the senior leader think so little of the manager that she could not be bothered to write more than a single letter? Even something pedestrian, like okay I will get back to you, would have conveyed more respect and attentiveness than that k.
Know When to Change the Channel. When two employees were required to collaborate, despite living a distance apart, they decided to primarily communicate via email. One employee, often using sarcastic humour, was experienced as smug and annoying by the other. He was asked to put aside his sarcasm in favour of optimal clarity. The other employee was given some tips on how to deal with the particular brand of sarcastic humour. The tension between the two only worsened, and after another month the second employee had had enough. She wrote a forceful, aggressive email to the first employee detailing how she hated his tone, how his sarcasm was driving her nuts, and why, in her opinion, he was not taking the project seriously.
A video conference call was set up. Ultimately, they were able to tolerate each other – just barely, but enough to complete the project. It was not that they could not work together. Instead, they needed to change the channel they were using from email to regular video calls. Video calls eliminated the miscommunication from their wildly different email styles while adding visual cues that conveyed their emotions and mutual good intentions.
One of the most powerful things we can do is to take pains to specify appropriate channels and formats across the culture. You do not always have to stick to the same communication medium, but make sure you choose the right one for the message. Using the wrong channel at the wrong time can even have professional consequences, as it could damage trust in you or even brand you as unsophisticated or unsympathetic. In choosing the right channel, you should focus on three factors: Length, Complexity, and Familiarity.
Length. Of the three factors, length is the easiest one to manage. Some colleagues (and family members) send multiple, consecutive, lengthy texts, as they are seemingly unable to squeeze their thoughts or ideas into one or two. If you want to provide someone with a lengthy (e.g., more than a single paragraph) update, use email. Refrain from using channels such as instant messaging. Use bold, underlined headings, include attachments if applicable, and make sure you briefly share specific context up front, so readers understand why it is important. Bottom line: if your message does not match the medium, find a more appropriate channel.
Complexity. Complexity is a lot harder to figure out. The general rule of thumb is that bigger, broader ideas require more reflection and/or nuanced thinking. If you are gearing up to make a complex argument, it is best to choose a medium (including a deck or a blog) that permits a greater level of detail and also supports add-on elements like photos, videos, or space for feedback and comment. Always be aware of the visual impact of your message. If it goes on too long, you risk overwhelming people. Too many boldfaced or underlined words can come across as chaotic. Images (appropriate ones) can both clarify and enhance trust, but superfluous ones are often distracting.
You should also be conscious of the timing of complex messages. Do not expect your team to absorb a novella-length email that you decide to send out at 17:00 on a Friday and respond to it thoughtfully an hour later. You should also not wait until the last minute to send complex messages that may invite some back-and-forth. In both cases, it would be better to end your message with an invitation for a phone call or an in-person meeting to go over the smaller details. Always use the channel that suits the tone and message that you want to convey, bearing in mind that just because we live in a digital world does not mean that digital is the only way to go.
Familiarity. Familiarity refers not only to our relationship with the recipient(s) of what we write, but also to the content of what we are saying. Who is your audience? If you have a close relationship with someone, sending that person a text may be a welcome, neutral disruption. In a business relationship, most people prefer communicating via email, which allows them to scan the subject line and decide when (or even if) to open and read the message. You should also consider your content. Is it personal or confidential? If it is, make sure you build trust by sending a direct private message instead of a public group IM.
Communicating Carefully establishes a base from which a team can successfully execute its goals. Ask yourself, “What do I want the person who reads this to do after I communicate this message?” By considering the Who, What, When, Where, and How of all your communications and including the context, the recipients of these messages will understand them more fully and your team’s performance is bound to improve.
Make sure that you measure success with details. Confirm that everyone understand what they have agreed to, including the owners, actions, and deadlines you expect. Set up a process to regularly review the measures of success to track progress and make ongoing adjustments whenever necessary.
Communicating Carefully is about ensuring that all the relevant players are on the same page. It is harder to accomplish this when you are working with digital teams, but it is not impossible.
Remember:
- Think before you type
- Choose the right Channel, and
- Focus on the detail of your communication.
References used:
- Dhawan E. Digital body language: How to build trust and connection, no matter the distance (2021)
- T. Frank H.A. Digital body language: How to build trust and win in the online world (2021)
