The Problem With E-mail
09.21.06, 1:30 PM ET
Leaving e-mails festering unanswered in your inbox and failing to return voice mails in a timely manner sound like minor workplace infractions, but committing them can damage team relationships and productivity in multi-location businesses.
According to a study commissioned by network-equipment maker
Cisco's report, "The Psychology of Effective Business Communications in Geographically Dispersed Teams," says that organizational effectiveness can suffer when e-mails and voice mails go unanswered for days, causing individuals to misattribute explanations for this black hole. This will lead a boss or employee to believe that the other is either shirking responsibility or work.
The report also emphasizes that e-mail is imperfect as a form of communication since it depends on respondents regularly checking and responding to their messages. E-mail also won't help you to discern what kind of a character you are working with, as no nonverbal, vocalic or verbal cues can be transmitted.
So forgive your employees if they sound a little square and strait-laced. It's fairly likely they vetted their e-mail for any signs of flippancy or frivolity before they hit the "send" button.
Cisco says that most traditional forms of monitoring and control are not feasible when managing a dispersed workforce of 50 or more employees. This "behavioral invisibility" makes it hard to build up trust. For example, you cannot observe the amount of cold calls your sales rep is making, nor can you overhear the guy from accounts bullying the interns. However, working thousands of miles away from your underlings is no longer an excuse not to talk to or see them.
Surely nobody wants an Orwellian scenario whereby you sew semiconductors under the skin of everybody on the payroll, or install a web cam on every employee's computer and hit a buzzer every time you see them steal off for a coffee break.
However, the report says investing in Skype headsets all round, and organizing a regular video conference call are good first steps. "The addition of video-conferencing results in significant improvements to the quality of a team's decisions and the use of richer media also results in increased levels of performance and trust," the Cisco report says.
Skype is a division of Internet giant
Effective use of technology can significantly shorten the time to effectiveness for those collaborating on projects in various locales around the world, according to the report, but care must be taken over the selection and deployment of different forms of computer mediated communication (CMC). Research suggests that it takes a minimum of two weeks before CMC relationships are as socially grounded as those made face-to-face (F2F).
"Users of electronic communication can take up to four times as long to exchange the same number of messages as communicating face-to-face, particularly as non-verbal cues can account for up to 63% of the social meaning within face-to-face exchanges," says the report.
Cultural differences can also slow communication. Multi-cultural teams can apparently take up to 17 weeks to become as effective as teams whose members are of the same culture.
"Individuals in 'high-context cultures' (those in most Asian, South American and Middle Eastern cultures and, to a lesser extent, French, Spanish and Greeks) tend not to express feelings and thoughts explicitly, whereas individuals in 'low-context cultures' (North Americans and most Europeans) do," says the report.
"Therefore, people from high-context cultures can often perceive those from low-context cultures as too talkative and obvious. Conversely, those from low-context cultures perceive others from high-context cultures as sneaky and mysterious," concludes the report.
