Why not pick up the phone?

I’m desperately conscious that I maybe accused of stating the obvious here, but I’m going to put it out there anyway. Here’s one of my bugbears that I teach on my Communicating For Impact course.

There is an abundance of technology available to us both at work and in our personal lives that allows us (at least in principle) to connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime. At work recently, the social-media-like “Yammer” was introduced as another new way for us to communicate with colleagues.

With dedicated departmental and sub-departmental mini websites on the corporate intranet (Sharepoint), instant messaging (Teams) which also allows us to message external parties too, WhatsApp groups and of course e-mail, we really do have an embarrassment of riches at our disposal to connect with others.

There is a role for each of these tools, and in each works best when used in the correct way; Yammer for sharing work-group information informally (and for virtual “high-fiving”), instant messaging for quick interactions to simple questions, and e-mail for providing details of more complex information to multiple people. As a species though, it seems we’re not great at following communication discipline, and I’ve seen lots of examples of poor practice via each of these media, but that’s a whole other topic!

But while we have all these tools, there is nothing that beats picking up the phone and actually talking to someone to provide a high level of immediacy while also developing your relationship with your counterpart. Why have we become so averse to picking up the phone?

I used to pull my hair out when one of my team tried to resolve an urgent issue through e-mail and made no progress, with instructions misunderstood, frustration building on both sides and more and more (often senior) people being copied-in to the thread. When I asked, “have you spoken to them?” I was often met with a befuddled look as if I was from another universe, and “It’s more efficient to e-mail…”

I agree, if one is solely interested in how long it takes to fire off an e-mail, top marks – it IS more efficient. But shouldn’t we be more interested in the efficiency of getting to an outcome?

A conversation allows for mutual exchange, problem clarification and assumption validation, with both parties readily able to jointly understand the real issue. Conversation is also a human-to-human interaction and however difficult the topic, if handled professionally, dialogue is accretive to rapport building and relationship development. Once the issue is understood, getting to a solution is far quicker, normal service can resume and we can all get on with our lives and other important stuff.

There are also myriad other benefits: it avoids clogging inboxes and stealing time from everyone on CC, it avoids post-issue communication that all is resolved (again, more saved time) and it saves you causing potential harm to your personal brand that you’ve fought so hard to develop.

So the next time you think it’s easier to e-mail, think again.

The best days lie ahead.

Martin