All of these cues bring energy and emotional nuance to our message,” she says. “Research shows that roughly 60% to 80% of our face-to-face communication is non-verbal language, such as the pacing, pauses, gestures and tone. Whether you’re signalling urgency or excitement with ALL CAPS, impatience and irritation with an “?!?” or mutual appreciation with a fist-bump emoji, you are helping your text to convey the feelings you would have embodied in person. Stylists may sneer, but Dhawan argues that they often help to clarify the meanings of the words themselves, much in the same way as a nodding head or a smirk in person. So, what can be done? Dhawan avoids offering hard and fast rules of online etiquette instead, it’s a question of mindfulness, so that we can be sure that our digital body language is intentional and appropriate to the situation at hand.įirst consider written communication, starting with the use of emoji and punctuation marks, like the exclamation point. “If you quantify that, it's 10% of a normal working week,” she says. In one recent survey of 2,000 employees and managers, she found that 70% report poor digital communication as a frequent barrier to their work, leading to around four hours of wasted time each week. And Dhawan’s own research suggests that these kinds of misunderstandings can lead to a major loss of productivity. Overall, around 56% of people correctly detected the sarcasm when it was written in an email – barely better than chance – compared with 79% of people who heard the same words spoken out loud. For instance, Dhawan cites research from 2005 on how people interpret sarcasm. Needless to say, the rise of remote working during the pandemic has only made these issues more urgent, but psychologists have long known that digital communication is ripe for misunderstanding. Like our in-person physical body language, digital body language concerns the subtle cues that signal things like our mood or engagement, and change the meaning of the words we say – be it in text, on the phone or in a video call. Did you check your phone or email at least once during the meeting? And did you pause to be sure that the other speaker had finished? Or did you find yourself frequently interrupting their sentences, as you failed to take into account the slight delays in the connection?Īccording to the leadership expert Erica Dhawan, these are all examples of our “digital body language” – a concept that serves as the title of her new book. Did its sentences end with full stops or exclamation marks, or did you forgo punctation altogether? Was it peppered with emoji – or plain text? And was your response prompt, or did you have to apologise for the time it had taken to reply? Think about the last work email that you sent.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |