Communication 3.0- The Best Ways To Engage

Communication is critical for career success, but it’s no longer enough to make eye contact and remember someone’s name—or listen closely and provide good feedback as a leader.

While employees and leaders once relied on written memos, then phone calls—or walking down the hall to speak to each other—people now communicate on a huge variety of platforms: a company intranet, work email, personal email, Microsoft Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, text, maybe even an good old fashioned voice call! The sheer number of options can feel overwhelming, and you can waste huge amounts of time during the workday cycling through various communication channels to see who said what.

As the work-from-home reality continues, more people than ever are relying on electronic communication as the main way to connect. But you need to know if the people you want to reach are actually on the communication platform you use—and willing to engage with you there.

So many options, so much confusion

Even if you have long considered yourself a great communicator, the pace of technological change means you need to keep learning. (Read about how to up your Learning Quotient here.) As a recent article in The Telegraph reported, veteran managers are having to change their style to connect with younger workers. Specifically, some are turning to social media, including Instagram, to reach their Gen-Z employees who were simply not logging on to email.

A writer in Los Angeles said that she recently bumped into a former colleague at an in-person social event (still probably the best way to build rapport and reinforce social capital). They agreed to meet the following week for lunch, but when the writer emailed to schedule it, she got no response. The week passed. She tried texting. No response. Later, when checking Twitter, something she rarely used, she saw that the colleague had tried to reach her by Direct Message. The intention to meet wasn’t enough; they had failed to discuss how, exactly, they would follow up.

Pick your platform, and let others know where to find you

A key skill in this era of Communication 3.0 is to decide which forms of communication you’ll use for work, and make sure others know. Choosing and communicating that choice clearly helps ensure you’ll stay connected and prevent communication overload—a real concern today.

You may have to reinforce the message until they catch on, as a senior operations manager in her mid-30s, whom I’ll call Kelly, discovered.

Kelly has a hybrid office/home office consulting job, and her team stays in contact by email, phone calls and pinging each other on Microsoft Teams. This works for them, but her clients often try to reach her through other means, including through their own work channels to which they’ve given Kelly access.

Kelly tried to accommodate her clients by using their channels, but this approach quickly became distracting and inefficient. She couldn’t handle the sheer number of possible places she needed to look. Sometimes she missed messages from clients altogether. Finally, to reduce chaos and improve communication, she asked her clients to use her work email exclusively when trying to reach her—and not to expect her to see a message sent any other way. It took time for them to remember and catch on, but today they respect this approach and she is able to respond in a timely manner. Good for her, good for her clients.

Another woman who sits on a variety of boards, advises individuals and companies, and does venture investing, found herself invited to the Slack channel of every single organization with which she is involved. The number of messages quickly became overwhelming. Keeping up with them all took so much time that it threatened to prevent her from doing any actual work. She made the decision to stop using any of these Slack channels and let people know to reach her in other ways.

Smothered by Slack? This overload- from any – or many – channels – is a real issue for lots of people today. It feels like you should be a “good citizen” and participate on all channels. But, if you’re finding it hard to complete your tasks at work, or seem to have less time than you once did, take a good look at how much time you’re spending on communication channels. You might even want to log your hours for a week. Then ask yourself what is essential, what is helpful—and what is a channel you need to quit. Or consider blocking out a few hours a day where you don’t check any channels and can focus on other tasks at hand.

Make hardware work for you

Kelly tried to set boundaries and protect her free time by not using her phone for work communications. This quickly proved too inconvenient. When a client called on the phone, she’d have to head back to her desk or home office to check information stored on her laptop. Now, she has all her work channels on her mobile phone and relies on her own self-discipline to carve out time off work.

She’s not alone. As a study cited on SecurityInfoWatch.com found, “80% of employee respondents use their smartphones for business purposes on a daily basis.” Still, taking time away from work matters. (Read this article for more ideas on setting boundaries.)

Less can be more

One person I know said her department head turned to excessive electronic communication to create connection. He tried to make up for lost in-person time by deluging his team with photos, birthday announcements and interesting articles on WhatsApp. These messages came on top of required twice-weekly Zoom meetings.

Good intentions; bad outcome.

The team includes 50 people, far too many to truly connect on WhatsApp. Instead, the photos and announcements distracted people from their work. “He means well, but it’s awkward for participants because they don’t know each other that well,”said the employee. “Small-group, focused What’sApp chats work for me, but ones with 50 people and all these happy birthdays and happy work anniversaries? It feels superfluous and redundant.”

No large companies use WhatsApp as their main communications platform, meaning it’s always an extra channel. This can be good for some uses, but not all. Any large What’sApp chat grows cumbersome. Imagine 250 people saying “Happy Birthday!” to each other 250 times a year.

The boss was well-intentioned. Leaders are struggling to build relationships and create culture in the new hybrid era. Electronic messaging can supplement relationship-building but there’s still no better approach than creating in-person opportunities for connection. A face to face get-together can spark creativity and build social capital across departments far better than a huge WhatsApp chat. One good option is to host an annual all-group meeting, in person, making sure team members from everywhere can join, if at all possible. Alternatively, or in addition to this annual event, do regional or city-based in-person meetings.

The annual meeting should include fun, outside-the-box activities that push people out of their comfort zone and let them express more parts of themselves, whether through a team go-kart outing, sharing songs from each country, or volunteering together. These kinds of activities help employees get to know each other as whole people, which can go a long way toward developing real connectedness. Add to this more frequent, in-person meetings among team members in the same country and you can help your team connect without having to respond to frequent pings from messaging apps.

Be smart about security and policies

While your company email account is not completely secure, public-facing social media platforms are far more vulnerable to being read – or hacked -by someone other than the intended audience. At Kelly’s job, company laptops stay at work for security, or at client sites. But since most people are also using mobile devices and consumer-facing communication products across their hardware, the risk of exposure is real. As the cybersecurity-focused online publication SecurityInfoWatch,com put it, these popular consumer apps, “do not contain critical encryption and security protocols needed to lock down communication and align with compliance and regulatory laws.”

Your safest approach to multimodal communication? As an employee, recognize that anything sent by a consumer app can be compromised, and use it accordingly. As a leader, set guidelines. As a recent article from the Society for HR Management (SHRM) put it, social media offers a lot of benefits to companies, including helping employees feel engaged, promoting the brand externally, and providing an abundance of learning opportunities. But it also brings potential downsides, including security risks. Because of these risks, “the employer needs a comprehensive and well-defined policy to prevent abuse,” says SHRM. This policy should include specific guidelines about behavioral norms on social media, such as politeness, rules around what company information can and cannot be shared externally, and the requirement that social media not compromise productivity.

Leaders also should consider taking a mobile-first approach to communication, and paying for a communication platform made for business that includes the latest security features. As SecurityInfoWatch article author/cyber security expert Anurag Lal put it, “Unlike commercial messaging apps, enterprise-grade secure messaging platforms are monitored and filtered to identify and stop attacks, giving IT total control over employee messaging across multiple devices.”

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Back to making eye contact and being a good listener? Those “old timey” skills still matter. An article on Indeed.com identified “7 Essential Communication Channels.” The most useful one? In person. Particularly when it’s a sensitive topic. As the article put it, “In-person is a valuable form of communication for sharing sensitive information or information that could be confusing with the ability for a back-and-forth narrative.

This is a good reminder for all of us in this age of instant messaging that even with all the options for quick connection, spending time together, in person, still counts as the primary one.

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