This week, we are putting on the researcher’s hat to determine in which situations face to face communication is more appropriate than mediated communication (via technologies).
In his post The Subtle Benefits of Face-To-Face Communication Brad Hunter argues that “The predominance of written communication gives us a way to edit our utterances until they fit the image we want to project. […] Since our words are our only connection to others, it is much easier to be duplicitous or even self-deluding.”
In our client’s context, the anonymity part does not play a crucial role since employees are identified, but mediated communication gives employees the ability to communicate through well crafted messages since they have plenty of time to organize their thoughts.
Our client experiences communication overload; employees receive an uncontrollable amount of communication every day.
In his blog, Chuck Martin shares the importance of face to face communication at work. He conducted a survey to find out what employees though about mediated communication. One of the respondent said that communicating via e-mails consumes more time than face to face communication.
Survey respondents argued that face to face communication (though not always possible) can make things go faster and encourage honest conversations.
These are just some thoughts. We are in the middle of our research and have a long way to go to come up with communication guidelines that will outline when face to face communication is the preferred way to communicate.
In which business situations would you argue that face to face communication is crucial?
aleverdier
Crystal Barce
Donna Z. Davis, Ph.D.
jaypeters
kgraven
larissaf
lkmccarthy
pagefitz
sytsma6
therea1long
jennamaria
Zac Brown
Ducks On a Mission 