FOCUS DIGITAL BODY LANGUAGE
The new rules for communicating In a hybrid world, digital body language is critical for team communications Writing Erica Dhawan
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ow do we write a message to a superior that makes us sound mature? How do we remind our co-worker to send us the report she promised without sounding passive-aggressive? How do we acknowledge the changes of the past year in our emails without sounding insincere? In May 2021, I published a research study with Quester called The Digital Communication Crisis (available on www.ericadhawan.com), which aimed to understand the challenges that we all face in workplace digital communication. Our survey of almost 2,000 office workers found that over 70% experienced some form of unclear communication from their colleagues. This leads to the average employee wasting four hours per week on poor or confusing digital communications, which adds up to an average annual amount of $188 billion wasted across the American economy. The ways we make meaning in team communications are more confounding than ever. Quarantine and the rise of hybrid-everything over the last year has meant even more digital interaction than we already had, and made the opening questions above more common – and more urgent. When the internet came along, no one was given an instruction manual for how to
Our punctuation, our response times and our video backgrounds are signals of trust, respect and confidence
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communicate – how to read signals and cues – in a digitized world. But the new cues and signals we send make up the subtext of our messages in digital communication. They are our digital body language. Everything from our punctuation to our response times to our video backgrounds are signals of trust, respect and even confidence. Yet we have all just picked things up as we went along, which has left room for mistakes and plenty of miscommunication. Even before Covid-19, things like Slack and Zoom had replaced much in-person interaction in the contemporary workplace. Today, roughly 70% of all communication among teams is virtual – and naturally, this has shifted how we work with each other.
Empathy and engagement The loss of non-verbal body signals and cues is among the most under-appreciated and wellconcealed reasons for disengagement at work. If used properly, and at scale, empathetic body language equals employee engagement. Disengagement happens not because people don’t want to be empathetic, but because with today’s tools, they don’t know how to be. Yes, a chief executive can say, “My office door is always open” and tell everyone he’s “accessible” and “approachable”. But what if he’s never actually in