No, this is not going to be about my dog, Manny, though I will use him as a starting point. I often envy the simplicity of his happiness and the unfiltered expression of his emotion – tail wag=happy, whine=unhappy, e basta, as the Italians would say.
We humans often forget that we are animals - social animals – and that, often, our nonverbal communication is equally, if not more, important than our verbal communication.
What got me thinking about this? Conference calls, or, more generally, working far away from co-workers such that all of your communication becomes one dimensional – either verbal or written (I will tackle written communication in another blog), both leaving out the critical body language component – the proverbial wagging tail. As an aside, it is important to note that in-person meetings have their own flaws and aren’t always the most productive, but, I want to address the additional layer of difficulty in accomplishing things with a group of people that you don’t share the same physical space with.
Conference calls - When you’re “meeting” on a call rather than in a room with other people, it is easier for each attendee’s mind to drift into his/her own separate thoughts because the human voice alone is not nearly as captivating as watching a person’s face as they speak - watching them scratch their head, breathe deeply, or maybe crack a smile. Needless to say, those subtle human movements are not only captivating but communicative. Eyebrows raised conveys interest or surprise. Furrowed brow shows you are concentrating or displeased. If you look at someone as you say something challenging, you convey confidence. If you look away, you are nervous.
This gets at one of the major reasons why conference calls are often not productive. Who’s in charge? In my opinion, a conference call REALLY needs a benevolent dictator, whereas an in-person meeting can be more of a brainstorming session where all players are more or less equal (though that can flop as well). This is because there is often confusion about who should be speaking and how to take turns doing so without the nonverbal cues. The director needs to make sure everyone gets his or her turn to contribute. It is also the director’s responsibility to recognize where there is agreement and use that to move the meeting along. In-person meetings have the advantage of behaviors including the head nod (up and down)=I agree and I also want to see if others in the room agree, the head nod (side to side) = I disagree but am not quite sure what I want to say in opposition, and so forth. You can move a meeting along just by reading these signals. On a conference call, however, you can stick your voice out there into the void and let it hang there for a minute, uncomfortably waiting to see what the response is from the invisible audience. Someone actually has to ask, “Are we in agreement about this?” rather than saying “I can see that we are all on the same page.” Cue the benevolent dictator who can help to ensure that the geographic distance between the people doesn’t result in a misperceived disparity of opinion.
So, how do we solve this? There are great new technologies out there to allow people to be virtually together – the videoconferencing. The technology for this has gotten much better so that there are fewer awkward delays that lead to people talking over one another or not understanding what is being said. And this gets us part of the way. But, there is still a sense of camaraderie missing – a kind of human chemistry that helps us to understand each other. Back to dogs - think about what they are able to communicate just by sniffing each other (not that I would suggest a similar technique with humans). This points out the multidimensionality of our relationships with each other – in a videoconference, we can hear each other, see each other, but we still can’t BE with each other. At my recent staff retreat of co-workers with whom I have spent many hours on the phone, some of whom I’d never met, there was a frenzy of socializing, condensing many months’ of missing contact into 2 ½ days, and a realization that we all just felt better to spend some time getting to know each other.
This geographic separation seems to have evolved from employers wanting to hire the very best people, no matter where they live in the country – the national search for candidates for a position for which, in all reality, there is probably someone pretty darned qualified right down the street, or at least closer than halfway across the country. There was a period where people just picked up and moved for work, plucking up their families from their comfortable communities where they knew where to buy the best cup of coffee and where the best shortcuts were to get around the rush hour traffic, to move across the country and learn the intricacies of a brand new place. Hmm . . . I guess I did that too, or at least as a tag-along military wife for the past several years. I have already written about the challenges of moving all over the country (see “Why I Have No Friends”), so I won’t belabor that. Anyway, more recently, technology has allowed people to stay put in Durango, while working for a company in San Francisco. This is essentially the expression of priorities – give up camaraderie with co-workers in order to keep camaraderie with those you really care about, your friends and family. I can’t argue with that.
But, can’t we have both? Let’s all just stop moving! If everyone stayed in the same place for awhile, maybe employers would look for local job candidates and they would be there, not out in California. And, businesses would become more localized and co-workers could have real, in-person, interactions with each other. And, maybe we’d all get more done - and wag our tails a bit more.
