Mark Murphy explains why email fails at work compared to face-to-face, video, phone, text, and voicemail. The problem: email strips away tone of voice, body language, and back-and-forth conversation. Using richer modes cuts miscommunication and strengthens relationships.
Here are 3 reasons why you may want to cut down a little bit on the use of email, especially for communicating with colleagues, employees, and bosses. Tone of voice. Two-way interactivity and body language. Those are three things that you get with face-to-face communication that you don't get with email. So when you measure the communicative bandwidth, basically how much information can you stuff into a message, those are three important things to look at. Body language, that's another way of conveying information. Tone of voice, another way of conveying information. Two-way interactivity allows you to adjust your message, change, fix things, et cetera. So face-to-face communication has body language, tone of voice, two-way interactivity. Video conferencing, it's a close second. It has body language-ish, does have tone of voice, and it does have two-way interactivity. Uh, phone, for example, does have tone of voice, does have two-way interactivity, does not have body language, but it's got two out of the three. Texting, for example, weirdly even has two-way interactivity. It still has something. Voicemail, which I know feels like such a 1993 kind of technology, voicemail, yes, it doesn't have body language, it doesn't have two-way interactivity, but, but it does have tone of voice. Email is the one communication modality that has none of those. There's no tone of voice, there's no two-way interactivity, and there's no body language. Plus messages, when email does have a tone of voice, some people will say, well, you can write to have a tone of voice in an email. And you can, it's just that tone of voice in email is 99.9% of the time a bad tone of voice, a negative tone of voice. It's an almost impossible to control tone of voice. So it's not that email should be done away with completely, but when you're trying to communicate with people, when you're building a relationship with them, when you're trying to to really interact with your employees, with your colleagues, with your boss, email is not your best friend. As much as you possibly can, even if you only substituted 10, 20% of your emails for a phone call, a Skype, a FaceTime, video chat, whatever, do that. It will start to make your relationships significantly better. And let's face it, it reduces the risk of a lot of communication missteps when you keep it off of email.
