Few things in life are as fraught as how we communicate, whether it is anxiously picking the right words to scribble in a Valentine’s Day card or agonising over how to ask your boss an awkward question. And that is before you even get into the murkier realm of digital communication and the newfound perils of, shudder, “hybrid meetings”.
knows these challenges better than most. Based at the University of Texas at Austin, he is a specialist in workplace technology and communication. His own circumstances meant face-to-face exchanges weren’t always possible in his teens, and this led him to study virtual interactions. When the covid-19 pandemic came along and we were all forced onto platforms such as Zoom and Teams, his insights became invaluable.
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Brodsky has now studied the virtual communication of more than 100,000 people, and his findings have led to a book, Ping: The secrets of successful virtual communication. Leveraging his research and insights from others in the field, Brodsky unlocks the secrets that can help us succeed in our personal lives and careers – as well as giving some pointers on obvious pitfalls. Should that meeting have been an email? How close do you have to be to someone before you send them a voice note? Brodsky has the answers.
Chris Stokel-Walker: Communicating digitally is something we all have to do, but what was it that led you to look at this so closely?
Andrew Brodsky: One of the things that was very impactful in my life is that I’m a cancer and bone marrow transplant survivor. When I was initially in treatment, I spent a good chunk of time having to interact with people virtually because of my immune deficiency, and it made me think: “How can we do this better?”
We’re now all virtual communicators. In the office, it used to be that the only way you could talk to someone or ask a question was to go over to their cubicle or desk. Today, even if someone’s only 2 feet away, we’re sending them an instant message or email so as not to interrupt them. How these technologies impact communication and how we can do it better felt like a really important question that was being lost in the conversation about remote work.
Why is it important that we do this kind of communication well?
Communication is at the core of pretty much every outcome in our work lives, as well as our personal lives. At work, your communication is vital in showing you are engaged in the organisation and it’s important for building relationships. Also, a point often missed is that, in the vast majority of jobs, there is no truly objective measure of performance. So much of the way that managers evaluate performance is based on their perceptions – and the filter between your actual work and their perceptions is how you communicate.
It feels like I’m personally bombarded with all kinds of notifications, from app alerts to phone calls and texts. Has our communication got better or worse over time?
There’s been a tremendous benefit from using digital channels. We can now communicate much more easily and richly with people all around the world, people we might not have interacted with previously. But the advent of communication technology has only occurred in recent human history. We’re all figuring out how to do this the right way, so a lot of things end up going badly.
How do you study digital communication in a scientific way?
It’s very multidisciplinary. There are studies in psychology, business, communications, information sciences and other fields. As a result, there’s a variety of different methods. There are simple laboratory studies, where you do experiments comparing people communicating through instant messaging versus face-to-face. There are also field studies of people communicating in real-life contexts. Other researchers take a more qualitative approach, conducting interviews to understand preferences. In the book, I bring together my own research and over 100 other studies. My own work ranges from looking at parent-teacher interactions at an international school in Vietnam to an analysis of 48 million video meetings.
You have studied an awful lot of people’s communication habits through those various methods. Are there lessons to be learned at a general level?
One of the biggest is that we tend to be very thoughtless when it comes to choosing a mode of communication. Often, people will have weekly hour-long meetings when a single email could have accomplished the same goal of relaying the necessary information. Or in the context of a conversation that started by email, people are unlikely to move that out of email, even in situations when a quick 5-minute clarification phone call could have saved days of back-and-forth due to a misunderstanding.
So how do we pick the right form of communication for a task?
There’s a lot of science that helps us understand this, including some predating the wide adoption of the technologies we use today. A key idea that has emerged from these studies is known as task-technology fit. In other words, you first want to figure out what your goal is for the interaction. Is being productive what matters most? Is it about building a stronger relationship? Is it about trying to come up with innovative ideas? Is it that you want to make sure everyone feels included? I would love to say there’s one mode that’s best. But it’s not that simple.
For instance, if you’re meeting someone new and you want to show you’re engaged in a conversation, having your camera on during video calls is useful. Alternatively, if you’ve got an existing team, impressions are already built, and your goal is to focus and maintain your energy, so having video cameras off can be more beneficial, because of Zoom fatigue. This last point is something Kristin Shockley at the University of Georgia and her colleagues . They found this video conferencing fatigue can even spill over to undermine an individual’s performance in meetings that happen the day after.
When we’re interacting in person and someone is standing in front of you, you’re acutely aware of the person and you’re very focused on how they’re going to react. On the other hand, when you’re interacting virtually, you’re often just staring at text on a computer screen. Even during a video call, you’re staring at a small square. As such, it’s easy to become overly self-focused, as Talia Ariss at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and her colleagues found in the early days of covid-19. They conducted that showed the proportion of time you spend staring at yourself during a video call is associated with a more negative mood following the interaction.
You mentioned that bosses evaluate us based on our communication. Could people apply your insights to communicate better with their boss?
If you’re requesting Zoom meetings with your boss twice a day, there’s a good chance you’re really going to bother them. Research shows generally shorter video meetings are more effective at building relationships. If you’re remote, having short video touch points every so often is better than having one very long, less-frequent meeting.
If communicating with someone who uses emojis, use them too. It can make them trust you more
Instant-messaging tools like Slack can also be useful for one-off questions. A boss will think someone who sends a short note summarising their work for that day, every day, is more productive than someone who waits until Friday to recap. But again, you should be careful not to go overboard.
Have all these new means of communication actually hampered our ability to connect with colleagues?
There’s mixed research on this. A found “computer-mediated communication” gave people liberty to self-disclose more, but then a 2016 comparing face-to-face and tech-mediated disclosure found face-to-face was better – though that only holds for surveys, not experiments.
With some of the least-rich modes of communication, you feel more comfortable disclosing much more personal things about yourself than you would face-to-face, because it almost feels a little bit more anonymous. In those cases, you can build stronger relationships. When you know how to make these communication modes more personal, and how to add back those missing parts of the interaction, then they can often be just as effective – in some cases more so – than in-person communication.
Actually, audio is often overlooked as a good communication option. People often default to either the richest communication form available, like video, or the least rich, like email. Audio is often ignored, but research shows there can be a lot of advantages to it. Compared with email, the telephone comes across as more authentic in terms of your emotion.
One thing that has changed recently at work is the rise of AI assistants. Does that help or hinder our communication?
There are two different parts to this. One is the risk of using artificial intelligence interpersonally. Let’s say you write your messages using AI. There’s a risk that the other person will realise you’re using it. If they think you might have done it once, they start to question every message you sent them in the past.
The other risk is cognitive offloading. A by Evan Risko, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, shows that when we have technology do stuff for us – like writing our communications or solving our problems – we don’t absorb information from that situation. We tend not to learn anything from it.
That’s not to say that AI doesn’t have its benefits. It can be really useful for brainstorming, editing, for low-stakes, repetitive conversations. But take a Zoom meeting: if you know an AI is listening in and summarising it, are you fully present in the communication?
I was horrified to learn in the book that we send unintentional signals in our emails…
Lots of information is being relayed and much of it we don’t even realise. My research with at American University in Washington DC shows from something as simple as typos, because typos make your emotions seem more intense. You seem angrier or happier. There are lots of other cues, from punctuation to the time of day the message was sent.
Emojis are also interesting. There’s no universal rule about how best to use emojis, but they do become of interest in research related to language mimicry. The idea here is that you should use similar cues as other people, so if they use exclamation marks, use exclamation marks. If they use emojis, use emojis too. The perceived similarity in how you communicate can help to make other people trust you more.
All this has got me thinking about voice notes. It would be rare for me to send a voice note to a work colleague, but perhaps I should?
Part of the reason people can find voice notes annoying is it can be slower to process than text-based communication. It’s richer in terms of interactions, which can be useful for building relationships from a productivity standpoint, but it can be more frustrating on the receiving end.
So, again, ask yourself: what is the purpose of the interaction? Is it about showing emotion or something more functional? If you are congratulating a co-worker on a promotion, a voice note might be a really good idea.
