The Great Lost Art of Communication

An Italian ex-colleague once told me that in his country it was impolite in the business place not to spend twenty odd minutes in conversation with a colleague before getting round to discussing work. For example "My mother made some great gnocchi last night? How hot was Berlusconi’s latest starlet? How bad were Inter this weekend? Oh and by the way can I just get those cost centres from you?" sort of thing. Actually he told me it was 50 minutes of chat for 5 minutes of business not 20, but I just can't bring myself to believe that. Whatever the duration this may go a long way to explaining Italian productivity relative to Northern Europe for the last thirty years. Whether this practice remains true today or not I have no idea and whilst I'm obviously not suggesting that it be adopted as a business model per se but there are things we can learn from this.

Why? Because somewhere along the line we've I think lost sight of what it is that makes us productive and cooperative in the workplace.

Real Human Communication.

Read any book on the subject and they say that 90% of communication is non-verbal (i.e. body language, facial expressions) so it seems mad to me that the default communication we now find in the workplace often isn't face to face. It isn't even voice to voice. Much of the time it's email.

Here's some stuff to ponder:

How many times do we fire off an email when we could easily pick up the phone?
Have you received a one to one email from the person sitting less than three yards from you recently?
Have you every kicked off a unintentional sh!tstorm when an email you sent got misinterpreted or only half read?
Do you need to know that the hot water in the kitchen on level2 is not working/working/not working again or the white Toyota Camry has left its lights on?
Let's not even mentions the infamous Claire Swire email?

It gets worse. I once had a boss who managed by email. Every day he'd walk into his office, barely acknowledging his team's presence, only to commence a day long stream of email dialogue.

I'm not suggesting that we abandon e-mail - it is a vital business tool after all - but what I am suggesting is that we think more carefully about how we use it. For example, I once worked with a very successful and organised sales rep who configured his email to refresh every two hours to reduce the disruption. The fundamental problem with email is that it is perceived to be 'convenient' and 'free'. The reality is that they often it isn't and until we find a way to measure the metrics of lost productivity because of this inferior form of communication I think we will suffer.

What if we followed the sales rep's example on a corporate level and say configured two email deliveries per day. People would argue about those vital high priority emails but that's missing the point. Collaboration tools and document management tools exist outside of email that could better serve those needs anyway. Making this small change I believe would drive behavioural change and perhaps we'd end up picking up the phone or even, shock horror, actually having a face to face conversation. When in Rome ...