To many of us, particularly in business or politics, communication skills are very important; we specify the need for them in job adverts, we evaluate them at interview, we go on courses to improve them. In general we mean face to face communication but not always. To me, sitting comfortably at home bashing out another article aspiring to make you think a little more about technology, some mastery of the written word is important, and similarly we often care about the tone of the letters we write to customers.
What has this to do with technology you might ask, what’s he rabbiting on about this time?
Communication is not what it was; it used to be that face to face or the letter were paramount but thanks to technology this is no longer the case. Now we communicate by telephone, video-conference, email, instant messenger and social media - communication has changed but have our skills changed with it?
How often have you been confused by the tone of an email? Not been able to determine whether the apparent abruptness is due to disapproval or haste? You will have certainly participated in telephone conversations when you didn’t know whether the words you heard were serious or light-hearted, honest or duplicitous. If you post on social media or “forums” how often have you been misinterpreted leading to someone arguing with your words when all you were trying to do was communicate the same sentiment that they appear to espouse? It happens to most of us. I used to have a colleague, a co-director, who refused to hold any important conversation by telephone because he didn’t trust the words unless he could see the speaker’s face. He’s retired now, probably just as well because his grasp of modern communication was not good, despite being highly intelligent, articulate and charming in person he regularly unintentionally rubbed people up the wrong way with his emails.
Similarly I regularly meet people uncomfortable with video-conferencing - despite being able to see each other they are still unable to interpret the tone and sentiment of the other parties.
Modern communication is different, it requires a different set of skills and practice. Unlike my old colleague most of us have adapted to the telephone, but email, instant messaging, video-conferencing and social media are more alien. Commonly, not knowing how to couch our words to suit the medium, we often resort to saying things simply with the result that our statements seem bald, even curt, to the recipients.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Personally I’ve been using email and video-conferencing for around 30 years, my early employment in an American global technology giant gave me a head start and some formal lessons, and I am relatively comfortable with electronic communications - both in making and receiving them. Decades of practice have helped, but the clue is in the previous sentence - formal lessons. At Xerox I was taught that my colleagues, particularly those I worked with in different cultures abroad in the USA, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Japan and other foreign climes, would not relate to or intuit my meaning in colloquial English, that our slang vocabularies might have different interpretations and that, like a successful fiction author, I needed to explicitly convey emotion - humour, approval, pleasure, sorrow, anger, concern etc. in order to avoid misinterpretation. I’d like to think that this training has benefited me over the years by helping to avoid the errors of some whose emails and social media messages either unintentionally rub me up the wrong way or leave me confused as to what they mean.
My dim and distant school education did not prepare me for electronic communication, and nor does today’s education system prepare youngsters for it. Many are taught to write letters, and of course we learn face to face communication every day as we speak with others and observe their reactions, but there’s no common equivalent for remote electronic communications. You might think that today’s youngsters don’t need training because they are accustomed to using electronic communication from an early age - but you’d be wrong. Most of their electronic communication is with their peers in a shared culture, and they are no better prepared to communicate electronically with a customer twice their age than they are with a Chinaman or a Martian.
Despite this lack of training we expect our employees to communicate, with customers, suppliers and business partners of different generations and nationalities, electronically. Electronic communication is not simply the norm, it has become the dominant means of communication in many businesses. We would not expect staff without basic numeracy skills to tot up the bill for a customer, but we would unthinkingly expect staff without appropriate communication skills to communicate with them by email. Some of us train our call-centre staff in telephone etiquette, but how many of us train them in communicating via email or social media?
The modern communications methods enabled by the Internet demand new skills if they are to be used effectively. Have a critical read through your email inbox and you’ll quickly see what I mean. If electronic communication is important in the business of your company, whether it is dealing with suppliers, customers, or branch offices overseas you might want to think about how you can improve it; after all I bet you were strongly influenced by the face to face communication skills of the last salesman you hired.
I shouldn’t let this column go by without a quick mention of the recently announced Windows 10. IT managers everywhere will be wondering whether it will be worth upgrading to, or if it will be another of Microsoft’s disasters. Lots has been written about Windows 10 elsewhere in specialist IT press but here’s my take.
You will almost certainly upgrade your company’s IT to Windows 10, and you might as well get on with it sooner rather than later - say sometime around mid-2016. Not because it will be wonderful - who cares about an operating system as long as it’s reliable and easy to use?
The big thing about Windows 10 for corporate use will be Microsoft’s new Web Browser, codenamed Spartan. Internet Explorer has never been good and the web is one of the most important components of modern corporate IT; Microsoft’s new Spartan web browser promises to bring Windows into the 21st century as a competitor to Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari. Aside from that Windows 10 appears to have rejected the follies of Windows 8 and reverted to ideas proven in Windows 7 and XP, and to have been thoroughly tested. The only big question will be whether Microsoft’s ambition to make one operating system work across the desktop, tablet and mobile will succeed, but for the corporate desktop you should anticipate the upgrade to Windows 10 as being a near certainty.