IM, email or phone call? How to get virtual communication right

A man with glasses smiles while using his laptop, reflecting a positive and focused work environment.

Professor Andrew Brodsky is the author of Ping: The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication. His book explores how to approach virtual communication strategically to foster clear understanding and achieve productivity benefits. He gives his tips on knowing whether email, text, Slack, video call or an old-fashioned phone call is the best choice, depending on what you want to communicate.

Suffering from an overwhelming inbox? He gave advice on that, too, when Project spoke to him for a Q&A.

Q. What are the benefits of making the time to stop and think about how you communicate virtually?

Andrew Brodsky (AB): They are potentially tremendous. Everyone can probably relate to the feeling of having hours of wasted meetings every week that should have just been an email; or often emails that should have been a phone call or a meeting. People err in the wrong direction and lose a tremendous amount of productivity as a result. And it’s not just about our time spent, but also how strong our relationships are, whether we’re building trust effectively and whether we’re making positive impressions. Because we’re often not being thoughtful about the mode of communication we choose and how we leverage it.

Q. How do you quickly build trusted relationships online?

AB: This gets to my PING framework, which is perspective, taking initiative, nonverbal communication and goals. The first thing I always recommend is to establish what your primary goal is. In many cases, organisations and managers are so focused on trust and building relationships that they sometimes make the wrong decision, like needing to have cameras on all the time, so we can always feel like we see each other. That can really be stressful and undermine productivity in many cases. In that situation, ask yourself: is trust the most important dimension, or is it just the one that’s most salient in your mind? Because often building trust comes at the cost of other things. There are always trade-offs here. I’m not saying trust is not important, but it’s not always the most important thing in any interaction.

Q. What are some of those trade-offs?

AB: One of the examples I give in the book is that research shows there’s less small talk in text-based communication, and that in-person negotiators perform better and have more rapport because of that. But the researchers did have one set of text-based negotiators engage in a five-minute phone call right before the negotiation to socialise with their counterparty. Those who did that ended up performing better.

Adding in those social elements – like small talk – into virtual interactions can be incredibly helpful for building trust. But the trade-off is that it hurts productivity. It can be really useful in certain situations where trust is key, like the formation of a team, but you don’t want to devote 10 minutes of every single meeting to small talk, because you’re going to lose way too much productivity over time. It’s about being thoughtful about where trust formation is really important.

Q. What are the dos and don’ts of having a difficult conversation?

AB: Are you choosing to do what’s easiest for yourself? The answer for that is usually email. The problem is that it comes off as extremely impersonal and other people see that it’s easy and low effort. They see it as very inauthentic and that you don’t care about them.

When it comes to whether to do it in person, or via video versus audio, the answer depends on your own underlying authenticity. I make the distinction between what I call true authenticity and something research calls surface acting. So true authenticity is where you feel sympathy for the person you’re trying to help improve, and in those cases you should choose video or in-person communication because it lets that authenticity shine through.

But in many cases at work we engage in something called surface acting, which is when our underlying emotions or feelings don’t necessarily fully match what we’re saying. It could be you had a fight with your partner in the morning, so you're unhappy, but you need to be nice to someone… The best approach for this generally is going to be audio interactions, whether that’s a phone call or one where cameras are off. The reason is that, with video and in-person communication, people can see nonverbal behaviour that shows [how you’re feeling].

Audio interactions are that sweet spot in the middle where it seems much more effortful and authentic then email, but it masks all of your visual, nonverbal behaviours that might leak through. It’s only your tone of voice and your words that you have to worry about, so other people can’t detect that you’re faking it.

Q. Any advice on managing your virtual inbox?

AB: A chunking approach is generally best, so arrange your communication into three buckets: towards the beginning of the day, just after lunch and towards the end of the day. The reason is that by constantly switching back and forth between communication and your work, you lose productivity. There is a study that indicates that it takes about a minute after each email to get back into the zone.

The last piece of advice I have is broader. By having conversations among your team about communication norms and response expectations, this can help decrease a lot of stress. So, you could say, for emails, let’s make sure we respond within 24 hours, and, for instant messages, we’ll respond within two hours. That way, if you’re in a focused period of work or you’re in a meeting, it won’t interrupt that. And let’s say there’s an emergency, either during the day or after hours, where we need something urgent. Maybe we’ll do text messages.

Setting these expectations reduces a whole lot of stress and misunderstanding and people can focus a lot more on their work, as opposed to constantly having to check their messages.

Andrew Brodsky is Assistant Professor of Management at The University of Texas at Austin, and the author of Ping: The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication (Simon Acumen)