Building a workforce to thrive in today’s ever-changing reality with COVID-19 has caused businesses to realign their internal communication strategies, approaches to customers, and overall work environments. One of the crucial elements that contribute to business continuity in this new normal is communication among employees. Here are several solutions to address the issues raised by digital communication and to improve corporate communication with colleagues.
Issues faced by employees in remote, digital communication and the solutions
With much of remote work happening exclusively through digital channels (audio meeting, video conferences, chat, text messages, shared platforms, e-mails, social media, etc), many employees are faced with in this new digital communication era. Some general challenges and opportunities include:
- The need to establish a “map” of digital communication channels to be used based on the type of communication to be held; e.g. video conferences for networking with new people, audio for meetings where visual aids are not relevant, chat for urgent topics, etc;
- Giving people who want to be heard the opportunity to do so. This can be achieved by establishing meetings whose purpose is to encourage free expression of employees based on their main tasks, challenges and ideas for improvement of their work;
- Cultivating positive and thriving attitudes among team members by establishing, for example, “team happy hour” meetings or meetings for employees networking, especially since it’s difficult for new comers to build strong personal connections in a remote way.
Based on each type of digital communication channel used, employees have indicated the following main challenges:
a. Videoconferences
- Issue: Timeline not adjusted to everyone’s accommodation, especially when participants are working in several different time zones. Solution: Set a video conference timeline when everyone’s productivity is at its peak, not too early in morning, not too late in the evening.
- Issue: Video platform delay leads to accidentally cutting people off or interrupting them in the middle of their speech. Solution: Improve platform efficiency or switch to a platform that presents delays close to 0.
- Issue: Hard to focus on meeting subjects because lots of background feedback/noise can be heard. Solution: Enforce the organizer “MUTE button” policy for every meeting so only the person who is talking can have his or her MIC open.
- Issue: Lack of engagement and difficulty figuring out if people are really paying attention when body language and faces lack expression (unable to know if the cause for that is because they are multi-tasking or disinterested). Solutions: Maintain some eye contact, be aware of body language and facial expression and intervene assertively when people show lack of interest, asking for that person’s input on the topic being discussed. Engage participants by encouraging them to express their assessment/results/feed-back/opinions. Ask open questions, use previous experiences as example and convey confidence so people feel comfortable in sharing their ideas.
- Issue: Too many attendees that participants need to communicate with and too little time to do it. Solution: Organize smaller meeting groups. Assembly in one meeting all those who need to present daily reports regarding a specific on-going project, in other, the employees who have suggestions and ideas on how to improve a current workflow or process. This gives each participant the chance to discuss with all attendees he or she needs to.
- Issue: Meetings take too long. Solutions: Lead the meetings in a concise driven style; ask participants to stick to the subjects on the agenda assuring them there will be time at the end of the meeting to discuss miscellaneous items; use quick comments, when applicable, to review “routine” topics.
- Issue: Communication is not done often enough. Solution: Establish meetings consistently. Their frequency should be established based on specificity of subjects to be discussed (daily activity topics, projects milestones, emergencies) or based on the team members’ proposed topics, if these have an impact on business results.
The benefit of remote work is seeing where people work and in a more relaxed environment to create warmth among a team; the use of video aid cuts the length of the meetings; face to face camera interactions help build relationships between team members; the “share screen” option is helpful and can replace a lot of talking that would take up more time from the meeting’s schedule.
b. Audio meetings
Often with audio meetings it is difficult to engage the audience and could be hard to focus on meeting subjects due to noise. Issue: The lack of video aids can be difficult for visual people to express themselves in a timely and relevant matter, especially in brainstorming meetings. Solution: establish video meetings with team members who are engaged and productive when visual support is used. When the business agenda allows it, ask employees about the type of meeting they want to have: video or audio.
c. E-mails
A common issue is e-mails length while some believe they are either too long or too short. Long e-mails have several flaws: they take up a lot of time to read; they can miss the main subject because of all the details presented; they can be written in a not relevant form — e.g. beginning with details and only presenting the main topic in the middle of the message. Short e-mails can cause readers to: miss out context or important details trigger a different decision on the e-mail’s topic, interpret the writer to be too direct aggressive or lack consideration.
There is no unitary solution to address this issue because the members of a team are different individuals with different backgrounds, education, experience and personalities and whilst some need more words (and longer e-mails) to communicate, others can do it in a shorter way.
Solution: Create the right structure and length adjusted to their subjects, recipients, priority; instill an “e-mail policy” inside the team; e.g. provide a structure template for e-mails (short introduction, main subject, what is requested or targeted with that message, etc); provide examples of well-written e-mails from those sent by team members.
- Issue: Inability to always convey tone. Sometimes, e-mails fail to transmit the right tone to recipients, which can lead to communication problems and difficulties in activity and relationship between sender and recipient. Solution: Expressing ideas in writing is not everyone’s strength. Managers can provide feedback and guidance about communication and tone.
- Issue: Long distribution lists. Solution: Use the reply all button sparingly.
- Issue: Incorrect use of punctuation creates communication difficulties. Exclamation points or entire words or sentences written in capital letters are just two examples of punctuation elements that can imply harsh tone or emphasis on wrong topics of the e-mail. Solution: Create a team style for how to interpret various types of punctuation.
On the bright side, communication through e-mails is not disruptive, allows the sender to design a format properly and recipients the time to respond in a way that is adjusted to the subject, sender, urgency and importance and other elements. E-mails also allow insertion of details, attachments and any other elements relevant to the scope of the communication made in the message.
d. Chat
Chat allows real-time communication between two or more people. People have pointed that some of the downsides of e-mails are characteristic also to chat: use of punctuation, inability to convey proper tone, issues with length (too short or too long) and with too direct approach.
One issue specific to chat compared to other channels of digital communication is that it’s disruptive: messages pop in the chat window anytime and by their nature, expect quick replies (otherwise another communication channels would be used). This can have a disruptive effect on recipient’s activity, which causes temporary loss of focus until the message received in the chat window is answered. When multiple chat messages are received during a single day, they can cause a decrease in employee’s productivity.
Solution: agree with the team the type of messages that can be sent using chat: short messages to confirm various aspects, communication regarding other types of meetings that are going to be held, short informal communication that allow team members to socialize, etc.
e. Text messages
Since the company internal chat was invented, several companies and employees have shifted part of their communication to this channel. A survey released by Ragan Communications and RMG in 2017 indicated that 98% percent of corporate personnel preferred e-mail as channel for internal communication, while only 13% percent used text messages/SMS. Still used by companies, text messages have two downsides which are, at the same time, also benefits: they don’t have the same urgency feature as IMs and they cannot contain the same amount of information as e-mails.
Depending on how much your team uses text messaging, you can implement solutions presented here under e-mails and chat, adjusting them to text messaging specifics.
Bottom line: Communication among employees has always been both a challenge and an opportunity. During the current remote work environment, it’s best to focus and build on elements that make digital communication an opportunity. In order to achieve that goal, teams should keep in mind their shared values, affinities and common goals all of which enables them to create a shared trust.
Managers and leaders must ensure they provide their people with the visibility they need (encouraging associates to make their voices heard), the clarity they expect, with the communication channels adjusted to their needs and with the trust entailed by a relationship of mutual support and guidance. These are key elements for businesses to thrive not only in 2021 but for the future.
About the author: Liz Kwo is a physician, faculty lecturer at Harvard Medical School, and a serial digital health entrepreneur. She lives in Boston. Special editorial thanks to Barbara Hou, Fintech Senior Legal Counsel.
