Some recent research on what it’s like to work in a half-face-to-face, half-virtual world arrived too late to be included in Can Your Hear Me? but confirms what I found doing the research for that book in interesting ways.

Ranstad US is a recruiting and talent company, and they combined with an HR consultancy, Future Workplace, to study the effects of virtual tools in the workplace.  The results are sometimes disturbing and always interesting.

More than half of the respondents, both managers and employees alike, said that they used virtual communication tools to handle workplace conflicts, rather than talking face to face.  That’s not a good thing, in case you were thinking otherwise.  And almost 80 percent said that communicating virtually has caused them to be more reactive than strategic in their daily work.  Also not good.  Two-thirds of managers believe that negative online reviews of their workplaces haven’t significantly affected their ability to recruit, but almost 60 percent of workers disagreed, saying they would never consider applying to a company that had negative online reviews.  Hmmm.

In the research for Can You Hear Me?, I found a clear warning:  ¾ of your fellow workers can tell when you’re texting during a meeting – and they disapprove.  Perhaps feeling that heat, this study found that slightly less than half of millennials admit to texting during meetings, and only 22 percent of baby boomers.  There’s a similar greater use of technology in many areas on the younger side of the digital divide.

And here’s a clear sign of what I warned about in Can You Hear Me?:  the promise of asynchronous communication, in which the comms channels would bend to our schedules, has turned instead into the nightmare of 24/7/365 communication.  More than half of all managers expect their workers to respond to business messages while on vacation.  Only one-fifth of the workers say they will.  But millennials are more likely to do so than baby boomers.

What’s the problem with that, you ask?  Well, then it’s not actually a vacation, is it?

One further unintended consequence of our virtual lives seems to be that the likelihood is going up that a new hire will back out after accepting employment but before starting work.  Millennials are far more likely to say that they will do this than baby boomers.  Perhaps, as I noted in Can You Hear Me?, that’s because they feel a weaker tie to the workplace given that it’s a virtual connection, at least in part.  If so that has worrisome implications for the workplace of the future.

What’s to be done? The experiment will continue. We can’t live without our gadgets. Too much of our personal and work lives today relies on the virtual. Indeed, most organizations with an international reach couldn’t function without the digital means of communication they use every day.

But we need to learn to live smarter and communicate differently to survive in this brave new digital world. We need to begin to consciously add the emotional subtext back into our virtual communications to avoid the costs—personal and financial—associated with miscommunication.

That’s what I argue in Can You Hear Me? It’s up to us to put the emotion, the human intent, and the meaning back in that the virtual world takes out.  Not one else will do that for us.  It means learning a third conversation, the conscious conversation of human intent, the one that we used to let body language do for us.  And we need to start now.