Even a short email can leave a team of employees pondering it for hours. — Photo: nortonrsx / Getty Images, via ETX DailyUP
The work-from-home generation has prompted many managers to question how we communicate in the workplace. After all, it's not always easy to get the message across to colleagues or superiors, either verbally or in writing. And this situation can be detrimental to employee productivity, and to company performance more generally.
The overwhelming majority of professionals worldwide regularly use written communication tools at work, whether email, instant messaging services (Slack, Teams, etc.) or documentation tools, according to a recent study by Atlassian.* Although workers are increasingly coming into the office, they are not necessarily communicating face-to-face with their colleagues. A survey by Unispace found that working people spend most of their time alone at their workstations when they're in the office. So it's hardly surprising that 44% of those surveyed by Atlassian say that writing is their main mode of communication.
Yet 61% of office workers say that written communication is the most susceptible to misinterpretation and misunderstanding. The reason for this is that employees are taking less and less time to draft the messages they send to their peers. In addition, these can often be filled with abbreviations and acronyms such as "ASAP” ("as soon as possible”), "FYI” ("for your information”) and "TBC” ("to be confirmed”), for the sake of efficiency. But if you write in haste, you run the risk of forgetting important information.Wasting 40 hours a year
As a result, an email of just a few lines can leave a team pondering it for hours. A third of employees surveyed by Atlassian say they waste more than 40 hours a year trying to decode and interpret their colleagues' messages. This is an aberration for Molly Sands, head of Atlassian's Teamwork Lab. "This poses a serious challenge for businesses. In the time that knowledge workers are wondering what their colleagues mean to say or what their manager wants from them, they could be doing mission critical work,” she explains in a statement.
To avoid this loss of time and energy, it's a good idea to think about how to make yourself understood. Email is useful for providing attachments and setting a roadmap, for example. Instant messaging, on the other hand, is more appropriate for sharing information quickly, such as a change to the time of a meeting. Meanwhile, picking up the phone is the best way to explain a situation or a problem in a more subjective way.
If you opt for the written word, make sure you also respect the rules of grammar and spelling. Text message language is not universally understood or even appreciated in the workplace. Expressive punctuation is a double-edged sword. Some people don't like seeing one or more exclamation marks in a professional message, while others see it as a way of adding feeling to their exchanges. Emoticons are more consensual: 78% of office workers surveyed by Atlassian say they are more likely to ignore a message that doesn't contain emojis. Generation Z employees are particularly receptive to these little pictograms, with 68% of Gen Z feeling more motivated when their messages receive emoji reactions. — AFP Relaxnews
This research was conducted by Atlassian, in collaboration with YouGov, among 10,000 office workers in the United States, Australia, France, Germany and India, between August 8 and 26, 2024.
