Does email use disrupt team performance?
18 October 2010
Read by 1899 persons
Email has become one of the main ways people communicate at work. It lets people respond when it suits them. Yet, everyone complains about it. Two main criticisms are the volume of emails and how impersonal it is. Let's look at the second point. "You know," a senior manager from a large company recently told me, "two assistants working in the same office send each other emails." Everyone feels it's important to spend time together, but why? Often, people say it's important to know each other to work well together. That's true, but direct contact allows for learning and mutual social adjustment. Social learning is the process that allows us to pick up on nonverbal communication, integrate it, and take it into account in our relationships.
The main message of nonverbal communication is emotional. I pick up on the other person's emotions and adjust to them. This creates a powerful regulation that helps people in a meeting converge. By noticing the anxiety of other participants, I become aware of an aspect of the situation we're discussing that had escaped me until now. Or, conversely, seeing my colleagues' calmness in a situation that made me anxious, my worry lessens. This mutual mechanism enriches our understanding of the situation or the problem at hand. Thus, through perceiving others' emotions, we get a better understanding of the problems.
Of course, many of our exchanges don't require emotional adjustments. We share factual information. But emotions arise unexpectedly, especially during times of change.
If some people give so little importance to this learning, it's because it happens mostly without us realizing it. We pick up on subtle nonverbal cues from others unconsciously. We integrate them into our reasoning without knowing it. Remember that we learned to communicate emotionally even before we spoke. But this dimension of collective emotional intelligence clashes with the rational minds of many managers. They believe that reasoning can be free of emotions and that managing people is purely rational. These people like to exchange emails, or perhaps it's better to say they enjoy it: it's so much easier to avoid confronting others! But by not considering the human dimension of communication, not only do we impoverish it, but we also provoke emotional reactions that complicate things considerably.
Posted October 19, 2010
lesechos.fr
The main message of nonverbal communication is emotional. I pick up on the other person's emotions and adjust to them. This creates a powerful regulation that helps people in a meeting converge. By noticing the anxiety of other participants, I become aware of an aspect of the situation we're discussing that had escaped me until now. Or, conversely, seeing my colleagues' calmness in a situation that made me anxious, my worry lessens. This mutual mechanism enriches our understanding of the situation or the problem at hand. Thus, through perceiving others' emotions, we get a better understanding of the problems.
Of course, many of our exchanges don't require emotional adjustments. We share factual information. But emotions arise unexpectedly, especially during times of change.
If some people give so little importance to this learning, it's because it happens mostly without us realizing it. We pick up on subtle nonverbal cues from others unconsciously. We integrate them into our reasoning without knowing it. Remember that we learned to communicate emotionally even before we spoke. But this dimension of collective emotional intelligence clashes with the rational minds of many managers. They believe that reasoning can be free of emotions and that managing people is purely rational. These people like to exchange emails, or perhaps it's better to say they enjoy it: it's so much easier to avoid confronting others! But by not considering the human dimension of communication, not only do we impoverish it, but we also provoke emotional reactions that complicate things considerably.
Posted October 19, 2010
lesechos.fr
