Monday, March 17, 2008

What is your 'electronic body language' saying?

By Stefanie Heiter

For years, office combat was waged in the open: man-to-man, woman-to-woman, woman-to-man. A boss's crossed arms, raised hand, head nod, or arched back spoke to us in an unwritten language. Body mechanics that immediately relayed whether we were going to praised or buried.

But the rules of engagement are changing. More often, our main contact with peers and colleagues occurs through virtual communication channels -- by e-mail, telephone or text messages. The cause-and-effect of these changes has been a gradual realization among senior management that the footprints left behind in "electronic body language" are significantly deeper and more impressive than originally realized.

At its core, an office that relies on virtual communications poses an overall but false assumption -- that we all share the same e-mail standards of etiquette. But still waters run deep, and the currents that flow below today's e-mail-based communication have an undertow that can test important management assumptions and skills.

The cross signals resulting from electronic body language surfaced in a preliminary study we are conducting as part of a massive survey on management and new office communications.

Consider the following early findings:

• More than 40 percent of respondents check their e-mail immediately as a new message arrives. Given that it takes the average person approximately 12 minutes to re-engage in a task once his or her concentration has been broken, this fact helps explain a corresponding finding -- that a majority of respondents feel that their volume of e-mail prevents them from completing other job-related activities.
• A significant communication gap exists in what employees feel is acceptable e-mail response time. The range at which respondents said they felt "slighted" relative to a response spanned between two hours to a week.
• Almost a third of respondents said that fewer than one in four office e-mail messages left them with a positive impression and motivated them to want to work harder with that person.

Early survey results show that routine "e-mail body language" decisions we make every day -- response time, length of e-mail, spelling and grammar, tone, initial greeting, fonts, send time, participation on teleconference meetings -- have significant (and often conflicting) effects in the office, especially on productivity.

Traditionally, work relationships developed in a meeting environment. Visual cues helped fill gaps between words and intended meaning. But in the virtual arena, communications often take on added importance, and subliminal messages and inferences about competence as well as clues about style preferences, gender, even nationality, convey differently from person to person. In they end, they often fall prey to significant cross-interpretation.

Understanding and appreciating the office's attitudes around the use of technology is an important first step to deflect misunderstandings. For some managers, staff members who receive a significant number of e-mails or are frequently interrupted in meetings are unconsciously seen as important "go-to" colleagues.

In other situations, employees who are constantly available and quick to respond to e-mails are viewed as highly productive. In these office settings, high performance is inadvertently based on communication habits, not necessarily standard metrics. Yet few companies are explicitly aligning these habits with desired outcomes. A supervisor, for example, who asks to be "cc'd" on all e-mails potentially conveys conflicting messages to his staff relative to work flow and trust.

Managers are beginning to understand how electronic body language can work for them -- how they can inspire colleagues and staff to put the needs of the team above those of fires burning in closer proximity. Often this means developing explicit rules of engagement for interactions and communications, understanding the unintended consequences of e-mail or an invite to a meeting, and making sure that the right information gets to the right people at the right time.

If used effectively, electronic body language can motivate employees and colleagues to work effectively, instill creativity and to inspire confidence. The key is adopting policies that are universally understood and which genuinely reflect the company culture.

By identifying what we find acceptable, rude, professional and effective, good managers can improve team interaction and can manage the diverse standards applied inconsistently across individuals, functions, organizations, geographies, and cultures. Electronic body language will expose the unintended consequences of information overload and pose a visible and real deterrent to organizational fatigue.

Stefanie Heiter is a partner at Strategies in Play LLC, a consultancy in Uxbridge. She can be reached at stefanie.heiter@strategiesinplay.com