What on earth are you doing?

A ticking off from the boss?

In this article, Jane Pimm from J2People, explores the lost art of conversation and why electronic communication can never replace the benefits of actually speaking to your colleagues and team.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ is what I heard from Jayne, my other and better half at J2People, when I’d posted something online about our business. When I say ‘heard’, I mean ‘read’ as this came in a WhatsApp from Jayne, late at night, and what it actually said was ‘not sure what you mean … what have you sent out?’. However, my overthinking brain immediately jumped to the conclusion that Jayne wasn’t best pleased with my activity and, too late at night to follow up, by the morning I’d decided I’d unknowingly messed up and the day started off badly.

Fast forward to the reality, Jayne literally meant what she’d said – that she didn’t understand my previous text telling her what I’d done. So simple! This got me thinking about how easily it is to misinterpret a text, WhatsApp, email or the myriad of social media messages.

What now?

Think about the words on the sign ‘what now?’ – just two words but with the potential for several meanings … ‘What’s next?’, ‘WHAT have you done NOW?’, ‘What was that?’ and the list goes on.

I don’t want to talk about it

Okay, so I’ve put that header in in homage to the beautiful 1988 (yes, really that long ago!) Everything But The Girl’s cover version of Danny Whitten’s song, but there is a point!

All too often now, managers default to email or messaging to communicate with their teams rather than speaking to them. Yes, sometimes it’s the easiest way to get a message out quickly in a busy workplace but every time this is done, we lose the opportunity for personal connection and provide an environment for misinterpretation to thrive.

At J2People, we find that we are often involved in cases, whether it be investigating disciplinaries and grievances, providing mediation for broken relationships, or looking at team effectiveness, that, when you come back to the root cause of the issue, more often than not there has been a communication breakdown somewhere along the line.

It’s tough being a line manager, we are in an increasingly litigious world and managers are often worried to say the wrong thing which drives a preference to communicate in an email where each word is considered and evidenced. However, this prevents the open conversations that may actually help resolve an issue before it grows wings. Yes, you may get it wrong sometimes, but it’s far more likely that your team member will appreciate you taking the time to listen to them and work things through together.

So next time you have a tricky issue and start to compose a perfectly crafted, risk adverse email, ask yourself why you are not having a conversation with the person? What is preventing you from picking up the phone or arranging to meet? If there isn’t a good reason for the email approach then start that conversation.

Let’s talk 

J2People are an HR Consultancy and we are passionate about supporting businesses to enable their employees to thrive in the workplace. We believe in Positive People – approaching people leadership with trust, openness, maturity and compassion – and this means talking and listening to your people.

If you would like to find out more about how we can support you to build a culture of collaboration and open communication – whether it be through effective case resolution and mediation, helping your managers to effectively communicate with their teams or utilising our policies, manager and employee toolkits and training – we’d love to talk to you. And yes, we do actually mean ‘talk’ – let’s grab a coffee and see how we can help you and your business.

Head on over to our website www.j2people.co.uk for all our contact information, there’s a phone number there for a chat but also an email address if you really want to use it!