As humans, we learn to communicate through interaction in the physical world. Taking and giving social and physical cues are baked into our DNA - tone of voice, micro-expressions, body language, eye contact and bio-mimicry. Working in a virtual environment denies us natural access to most of these and lower-quality versions of others. By working remotely, you and your team may be losing touch with the human side of communicating.
How virtual communication impacts us
Some research has shown that remote work can impede collaboration. But finding the correlation in our own environment isn’t straightforward - communication and collaboration aren’t mathematics - so attributing problems directly to remote work can be challenging. I work in the software development industry, and from my own experience in organizations and team interactions, there were noticeable impacts in some areas that correlated to the increase in virtual work (or fully remote work). You may or may note be seeing some of these or other affects in your environment:
- Quiet individuals in teams withdrawing
- Increased mental health concerns
- Individuals struggling to get their point across
- Low verbal participation in meetings
- Clear lack of focus in meetings by participants
- Lack of shared mental models in understanding after meetings
- Meeting objectives not met
Redefining communicating like a human in a virtual environment
Suddenly relearning to communicate - and this is essentially what transitioning to remote work results in - doesn’t happen overnight. Bad habits form quickly, and if you and your team are going to thrive in a digital workspace, you must make a conscious effort to address this. One way to improve communication is to mitigate the loss of social cues while in a virtual space. Do this by consciously reinforcing typical physical world cues and supplementing them with new techniques and tools.
Where do you start? Below are some notes of what has been effective in my domain:
Interactions
- Encourage webcams of participants being on: this gives you back some body language cues, some facial expressions and some form of eye contact
- Supplement social and physical cues: use features like raising your hand and showing emotions/emoticons to show engagement and stay in the conversation. With low latency and small teams, you could achieve this by having participant cameras on, but if people start speaking over each other or if you are sharing a screen on online tools, you may still need to lean on these features more
- Use verbal cues: replace the lack of body language with increased verbal cues such as confirmations to replace nods. Nothing is worse to an individual than speaking to silent darkness -(imagine being blind and talking to a crowd)
- Stay focused: with the ability to hide distractions or the temptation to multi-task or type in chat while in a meeting, it’s easier to be distracted or to distract the speaker in virtual meetings. As a participant, avoid doing this and focus on the speaker and meeting/collaboration objective.
These overlap with good facilitation, active listening skills and general conversational and collaboration skills that can improve how we communicate. However, for me - importantly- there is a clear theme in the above list:
Be empathetic towards the speaker and other team members and focus on active participation.
The way you work
- Use online tools fully: learn to use your tools properly (Miro, Microsoft Whiteboard etc.). Being a power user on digital whiteboards and drawing tools helps immensely with efficient collaboration and participation
- Meeting objectives: set an agenda and an objective. Create a shared mental model and objective to work towards
- Grow your facilitation skills: learn to facilitate better - another no-brainer, but take a digital (or normal) facilitation course. Being able to facilitate collaboration well is a superpower for achieving goals jointly
These have another clear theme:
Adapt and improve your ability to communicate effectively and be deliberate in how you do that virtually.
Conclusion
As online tools improve and with the global increase during and post-COVID-19, fully or partially remote teams are a reality of how our world has changed.
Be aware of how hosting, facilitating, and participating in a virtual environment removes many of the communication tools we naturally have as humans and be conscious about mitigating the drawbacks and adapting how you communicate while part of a team that works together virtually.