Blog
Date: 09 March 2010 Author: Bob Dalton, CEOThey do say that all things come to those who wait....
For years now I have been regarded as somewhat of a Luddite, eschewing the more advanced forms of business interaction in favour of dangerous, radical, even slightly heretical methods such as looking people squarely in the eye and talking to them.
Desperate measures I know, but email can be so impersonal, and so dramatically open to misunderstanding and confusion. How many times has a colleague taken you into their confidence, glowering darkly, and asked you to agree that the “tone” of an email they had just received was distinctly “off”? What tone? It is a written note for goodness sake, and one created in a medium that encourages haste, the dashing off of ill thought out missives with no opportunity for real time clarification of the spirit and intent of the transmitter.
I despair, I really do. I’m not anti-technology, honest I’m not, but for years now my constant mantra and plea to the troops has been: “Firstly, go speak to people, if that is not possible, then pick up the phone and talk to each other, and only if none of these is possible, under pressure and as a last resort, email. Oh, and then put a call in to them as a follow-up just in case the tone of your email was perceived as being a bit ‘snotty’”.
But hang on a minute. The world turns, technology develops and a new way emerges. At Intact we use a social interaction tool called Yammer and - against the firm expectations of almost the entire company - I have become a huge fan. You see, Yammer’s really just an extended conversation. Someone sends a brief note to a colleague, and if the meaning isn’t clear then they can query it in real time. A brief interaction and clarity flows. Brilliant!
Coffee machine chats and conversations now take place between Intact team members across the world from Singapore to Cincinnati, via Ascot and Berlin. Social interaction and team-building dialogue, interspersed with nuggets of communication of real value to our business, and those of our customers. I love it!
But it doesn’t end there. Thanks to the brave new world of unified communication we are moving surely - and at some pace - towards the use of voice and video as the real combined “killer apps”. Towards a working environment where we will all default to talking to each other again, seeing each other as we converse - wherever we are in the world, and only using email as a last resort. Even more brilliant!
See? Turns out I was right all along, not a Luddite, just ahead of my time.............
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