When you're naturally brief online, coworkers might think you're annoyed. The fix: over-communicate. Send multiple paragraphs, videos, and links upfront. Managers especially should respond fast and answer follow-up questions before they're asked, using tools like wikis to share information richly.
we're talking about just the digital communication. I definitely could seem like a bit of an a-hole in my text communication, email communication, right? Because I tend to be very concise and stuff. Do you like— that has to be something that you guys have tackled, right? I mean, do you have any insights on something like that?
I have insights on this. I think it's an active work in progress. I think the main difference— I mean, you've said it yourself, the issue is that you're very concise and some people read the conciseness as, you know, being an a-hole, but you know, in reality that's not the case for you. I hope not. But still people will, people will still perceive it to be that way. So I actually learned this from my co-founder Krish, 'cause he's a genius at this. And the way that I've seen him address it is just to include as much information as possible as soon as you get a question and like just over-communicate. Like the only, the real answer to that is just over-communicate. And at least in our experience and like, send a video, send like 3 paragraphs of text, send links to the documents, links to potential, like even questions that you know that they might ask as a follow-up, answer those in advance. So, and also what I've also seen is that this is a more common problem for like people who are managing others. So for managers, it actually requires, in my opinion, a slightly different way of communicating, which is to over-communicate as much as possible and send as much information as possible. And also speed matters a lot for managers so that you can just unblock others who are waiting on your response. Like it would suck to be someone, right? They send you a really thoughtful question and then you respond in like 3 words, like 3 days later, and they're just like, ah, screw this, you know? So for what I've seen from this, and we're still learning, is just like over-communicate and be very, very fast in your communication. Yeah, invest, I guess, in the tools that let you overcommunicate, like wikis and, you know, anything that would help with that.
