Organizations are rightly concerned with the health and well-being of their workforce this week. It is, frankly, refreshing to hear of major organizations like Stanford University and Apple being willing to make dramatic changes by encouraging/requiring that their business be conducted remotely. Something that isn’t being discussed, however, is what happens to your organizational members’ communication skillset when they are forced into conducting every interaction through a remote work platform? You cannot simply assume that because your people are competent at communicating face-to-face, they will be equally as competent when you tell them that they have to work remotely for the next few weeks.
One answer can be found by better understanding Communication Competence and how it changes when the communication moves to a mediated context.
Brian Spitzberg and William Cupach, both important figures in human communication research, argued that Communication Competence was based in the ability to demonstrate four particular types of communicative skills:
Attentiveness - Concern for, interest in, and attention to the other person(s) in the interaction
Composure - Assertiveness, confidence, and being in control
Coordination - Managing timing, initiation and closure of conversation, and guidance of topics
Expressiveness - Displaying a vividness and animation in verbal and nonverbal expression
With all human communication, the medium for that communication is incredibly important to the functioning of the interaction. What if the medium suddenly changes, without warning, planning, or preparation? That is the situation many workers will be facing in the coming days, as their employers allow, encourage, or even mandate work-from-home. As the communication medium changes, so too do the demands of the interactions.
The effect of a organization-wide switch to mediated communication channels could be dramatic. Consider text-based interactions on a platform like Slack: Immediately, we can see that it’s going to be much more difficult to be Expressive - as purely text-based channels lack most/all of the nonverbal channels that exists when communicating face-to-face. Coordination of messages is more difficult because those platforms are varying degrees of asynchronous - controlling conversational flow and topic direction is more difficult there. Attentiveness and Composure become problematic because we usually express these things (at least partially) nonverbally, which goes out the window in a Slack channel.
How do you communicate competently in a mediated channel like Slack?
Promote Attentiveness by making sure you acknowledge the high-quality contributions of others in writing. Remember, a head nod and a thumbs-up won’t cut it anymore. For example, “Thanks, Linda, that was an excellent idea, and I want to make sure it doesn’t get buried here in the chat. I’d like to build on what Linda said by adding…” Yes, that sounds overly formal, but it’s necessary to make up for the shortcomings of the medium.
Promote Composure by making your writing more assertive. Lose the hedges, qualifiers, and tag questions that signal a lower power-position (“umm….”, “well….”, “I may be wrong, but…”, “….don’t you agree?”), and a reluctance to assert your position. Get your ideas out there: One of the great things about a medium like Slack is that everyone in a chat has equal access to it. You aren’t subject to the same conversational turn-taking dicta that you are in a face-to-face interaction.
Promote Coordination by giving ample signposts to your coworkers. Signposts are conversational transition points that give others in the interaction guidance on what’s coming up next, provide options for different directions the conversation could go, and give warning when the conversation is to end, or a new one needs to start. Example: “We are going to need to make a decision in five minutes whether we would like to revisit the proposal one more time, or whether we are going to send it up the ladder…”
Promote Expressiveness by using all of the tools available in the medium. Make the interaction as cue-rich as it possibly can be. Use emojis (née emoticons, which were created to reintroduce some form of nonverbal messaging back into a text-only medium), photos, gifs, links, and text styling (e.g., bolding) to highlight, emphasize, and direct the interaction.
Finally be an expert in the technology used to communicate. Any technological mediation puts a premium on knowledge - not all persons will be equally as skilled at manipulating the technology, and the ones who are more fluent in the technology are at an advantage. When using the technology is your only way to conduct business, you either master the technology or you can’t communicate competently.
