This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 7:03 am by Dawn and is filed under Industry talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Janet Clarey found a Wall Street Journal article lamenting the informal communication style of many young job seekers and what it means for business communication. As Clarey wrote in response:
… I think the communication disconnect is significant for educators. How can we support a ‘recruit/retain/train’ strategy targeted at younger workers if the organization bans their preferred methods of communication?
I suspect businesses probably have enough “proper” letter writers on staff (you remember the baby boomers don’t you?) so perhaps hiring people who communicate differently will appeal to a new (or evolving) group of customers. …
Communication, as many people who are happy to help your self-help along will tell you, is about what people hear more than about what you say. And what people hear from business communication is changing, as it has been, as it will continue to do.
But for a minute, I’m going to talk about clothes.
Our clothes say things about us. Along with our body language, our tone of voice, our facial expressions … all these cues tell people something about the content of what we present to them.
It used to be that women weren’t supposed to wear pants in formal settings, it communicated that someone was low class. Then pantsuits were all right, in some places. Now hardly anyone even thinks about it.
It used to be that no business offices allowed jeans. And then jeans were sometimes all right on Fridays. Then there were whole industries where a visit to an office might find executive management slouching around in denim. That’s a little more sector specific, but no one sees someone in jeans anymore and thinks it means they can’t be competent.
Our perceptions of people’s physical packaging has changed. How much more are our perceptions of their communication packaging likely to change?
As Clarey noted, not even prolific texters consider text message speak to be proper writing and they know it’s important to learn how to write well. But their communications exist in an entirely different environment than the one that gave rise to the classic, formal business letter.
I learned how to type those in high school, they still taught that. It wasn’t that long ago, even though I think the preferred styles have changed. Paragraphs, for example, are almost never indented anymore, as I was taught they always must be. People are more economical with their keystrokes than that.
When I was first being taught how to type, programs ran from floppy disks, computer printers often produced very poor quality documents and an electric typewriter that could remember a few lines of type was a hot ticket item. And again, this was not that long ago. When people needed letters sent, someone in the company whose specialized job it was to type things would tap-tap-tap away at a typewriter that made once-off original documents. That constituted the bulk of meaningful communication for a very long time, and was the norm less than two decades previous.
Consider what this meant for the maximum possible volume of communication; both what you could send out and what other people were likely to send to you.
Flash forward to today. Typing isn’t a job in itself, it’s something that nearly everyone is expected to know how to do. Others can reach us by email, which weighs and costs nothing, and has no natural upper or lower bounds on length. If a person can count their daily volume of mail in dozens of messages, they’re lucky, everything from long and detailed theses to quick hellos comes into our mailboxes. Others can reach us by text message, with the possibility of dozens more messages from coworkers, friends and family, any time of the day or night. Instant messaging, IM, is common in many workplaces even as a substitute for wandering the halls, and the potential interruptions it presents may have to be carefully managed.
The newest generation of self-help manuals often devote whole chapters to managing the deluge of people wanting to talk to us.
A whole generation of people has grown up knowing how easy it is to lose emotional context in electronic communications and accidentally come off as harsh, angry or distant, possibly starting unintended fights.
Is it any wonder that abbreviated words (time-saving, but also signs of trust and comfort), quick responses to important subjects or events (procrastinate, and you’ll have 20 more messages or items on top of it by lunch), and emoticons (on the internet, no one can see you smile) have become so widely adopted?
If social media is going to be about communicating more, it’s going to have to be about communicating differently. It’s going to have to communicate more context, more tone, in less space. It’s going to have to be about finding new norms of politeness and respect, not a free for all, but something that can come across over IM.
It’s a new world, and that’s how your customers are going to be talking to each other. Not just ‘young’ people, but their families and the older colleagues who’ve just decided to go with the flow. Those not-especially-young folks that have too many people trying to contact them all the time, as well, and can’t send out a formal letter every time someone sneezes at them.
It’s a different world. And that means that things will be … different. I don’t know why, but sometimes people forget that.
Though it’s not the end of the world. And look how well everyone adjusted to pantsuits.
Leave a Reply
