When I was researching virtual communications for Can You Hear Me: How to Connect with People in a Virtual World, I had no idea that the transition from face-to-face communications to the digital would accelerate so suddenly because of a virus.

But here we are.  Many organizations have effectively shut down their offices and told everyone to work from home.  It’s a huge shift, though presumably a temporary one, until the worst of the spread of the disease is over, and there are many, many facets of the change to discuss.  But in this post, I’m focusing solely on how to make the instant-telecommuting experience better in terms of communicating with your colleagues, your clients or customers, and the public if your role is public-facing.

1.First and most important, understand that virtual communications, especially text-based ones, are fundamentally different from face-to-face, in one important way.  Face to face we convey emotion to each other – and therefore intent – mostly via unconscious means.  We smile, we nod, we touch the other person’s arm.  That’s how they know that we’re being nice or sarcastic, supportive or critical.  And never forget – that’s what the other person cares about most of all:  your intent.  Not your precise words.  Your intent.

Virtually, almost none of that intent comes through.  When you send someone an email that says, “nice job!” you’re just being supportive and friendly, right?  Sixty percent of the time the other person thinks you’re being sarcastic.  How could they be so, well, dumb?  Wrong question.  The right question is, how can I make my intent completely clear without my facial expressions or body language?

So use emojis.  Read your texts out loud in a sarcastic tone.  If that makes sense, that’s probably the way they’ll be received.  Add emotional language that removes that ambiguity.  Make your intent clear.

It’s not the other person’s fault.  It’s up to you to make your intent clear.

2.Second, understand the Virtual Communications Hierarchy. It goes like this:  first, text-based communications are the most common, come in the greatest volume, and are the most likely to be misunderstood.  Let that sink in for a moment.  You’re going to spend most of your time communicating via some form of text messaging, whether texts, emails, or Slack, and those missives are going to be misunderstood fifty percent of the time.  You read that right.  The research shows that people believe they understand and are understood in text-based communications ninety percent of the time, when actually the rate is fifty percent.  No better than chance.

And the whole problem is compounded by the vast increase in the sheer number of text-based communications we receive every day.  One executive I talked to during my research told me that he received 6,000 texts, emails, and Slack updates per day.  As a result, he skimmed, he deleted, and he performed triage.  And, his responses got shorter and shorter – and thus more likely to be misunderstood.

It’s what we all do.

Second, audio calls and conferencing are the next step up in the hierarchy.  They are better than text-based forms of communication because participants have the opportunity, typically, to follow up, ask questions, get clarifications, and generally ensure that they understand and are understood.  So when you have something to communicate where the intent behind the communication matters, pick up the phone.  And ask, once you’ve finished your thought, “How did what I just say make you feel?”  This has two advantages.  First, you may actually learn how the other person feels.  And second, you show the other person respect and vulnerability.

Beware audio communications in one respect, however:  the compression of the sound for most phones, VOIP systems, computers, and so on means that the human voice that comes through to your ear has the emotions compressed out of the sound.  So you may not be getting a clear read on the other person’s emotions and he/she may not be understanding yours.  “How did what I just say make you feel?”

The final step up the hierarchy is video.  If you’re going to spend any amount of time telecommuting, you should immediately plan to make most of your communications, especially the important ones, this way.  Because, obviously enough, you can see and be seen, you greatly increase the amount of emotional information and information about intent that comes through, you reduce accordingly the amount of ambiguity in your communications, and you increase the efficiency of your communications overall because you reduce the amount of damage control you have to do when miscommunications happens.

That said, video has its own technical and human challenges.  I talk in more detail in Can You Hear Me? about the particular issues involved and how to conduct video communications like a champ.  But the first thing to understand about video is that it puts your brain in a very uncomfortable position.  Your (unconscious) brain devotes a good deal of effort to tracking where you are in space, and where the other people in the room are in space around you.  On video, your brain goes into stress mode because it can’t make sense of the size of the other participants and their distance away from you.

You can help the people looking at you by doing what set designers in the movies and on TV have done for years:  give clues in two dimensions as to the three-dimensional depth of the picture they are seeing.  Picture the set of Friends.  It has a sofa, a bar, space behind the sofa, a wall behind that – several levels of cues about size and distance.  You need to do the same for your “set,” so that the people watching you don’t stress out over where you are.

These are a few of the basics for making teleworking bearable and efficient.  Can You Hear Me? has many more ideas and suggestions.  I’m also available (via webinar, of course) to talk to your organization about how we can all get through this coronavirus era.

Stay safe, everyone.