I have been contracted by a national association of medical service and equipment providers to be their Association Business Operations Manager. I am lovingly called the ABOM.
Since the members are all over the U.S. and I am in Las Vegas, most of our communication is by email.
Many of you may know that I don’t consider email a good communication method. It may be the worst possible way to attempt to get anyone to truly understand the message and its intent. It is the intent that is missing from emails that makes them easy to misunderstand.
When I conduct my Successful Customer Relations presentation, I always begin with a discussion on communication. I talk about how we use a filtration system to encode an idea into verbal and nonverbal communication. I talk about the need to minimize the noise factors that interfere with effective communication. I also cover the need for feedback to ensure understanding of the message and idea being communicated. I even cover body language and nonverbal cues. I cover the mechanics and the “should dos” well.
However, the mechanics don’t take intent into consideration. Intent encompasses your objective for the message and expectations of the response. The intent of the message should dictate the communication method best suited to ensure good communication.
First, let me state that good communication involves proper informing. Informing is telling the what, the why, what can be expected as a result, and gaining acceptance of understanding. Without acceptance, there is no communication.
Also important is that research indicates that the words only carry 7 percent of a message. The voice tones and inflections carry 38 percent and the nonverbal cues (body language) carry the remaining 55 percent. Now, let’s discuss the methods of communication.
The first is face-to-face. In this method we have immediate response and can observe the nonverbal cues from the body language (the entire message). We should use this method when the subject is both urgent and important. A written record of the conversation should be kept for follow up purposes.
Telephone is the next best method to ensure that the message is communicated. You miss the body language however you can hear the voice inflections that carry much of the message. The telephone allows for a full feedback driven discussion and allows for communication of urgent and important issues. Contemporaneous notes will provide a written record.
Texting is an addition to the communications arsenal. It is immediate and can be used for important and urgent communication. We may have a written record of the conversation. We now begin to lose the nonverbal cues.
Email seems to be the preferred method of communication now. We send an email, it disappears onto the cloud, and we expect a reply sometime in the near future. This method may be used for important but not for urgent messages unless we are sure that we will get a prompt reply. Any written communication is subject to the Ladder of Inference effect so we must be careful with our wording. (If you don’t know what that effect is, Google it or see my discussion in a previous TechNation article).
Then there is “social media” – Facebook, Twitter, etc. Although the users consider these methods important and urgent, especially Twitter, how important is it for me to know, right now or at all, that you just ate a ham sandwich without mustard? The purpose of these seem to be to keep anyone who may have interest aware of your daily activities, concerns and moods.
I will not discuss snail mail, newsletters and webinars here so I have space to discuss the next topic – email usage. You see, email has become so prevalent that it has superseded all other forms of communication. It is abused and overused and quite often ignored. Our expectations are that we can “intrude” on anyone about anything if we send an email. We don’t even have to provide all the information within the email, nor do we have to use proper spelling, grammar and courtesy (Ruth is fond of pointing out my errors after I hit the send button).
I get many emails that do not even have a nice greeting and close, just one giant paragraph that was obviously not given much preparation time. Leaving me to decipher the what, the why and the expectation. I have come to the conclusion that email is not a form of communication at all. There is no communication without acceptance of understanding. If you leave me to make the interpretation, I guarantee that I will interpret it wrong.
Also, email does not seem to adhere to any etiquette. Do you even reply, and by when? What should I do if the content is important and you do not reply in a “reasonable” time? What is a reasonable amount of time before I escalate to a phone call, or a face-to-face? How do I know that you really understood my intent? I propose that email be used for non-important yet possibly urgent topics. If the message is important and urgent call me, leave me a message and I will get back to you in a reasonable amount of time after I peruse my hundreds of emails.
