Dhawan explained, “When we just reward the first person who responds or the three people who agree, we may miss out on the fourth person who disagrees. The pressure to communicate fast often rewards the first people to respond to an email or the quickest person to jump in on a zoom call, instead of what might be the most thoughtful idea. “We have to bring nuance back because body language is transformed, online,” Dhawan said.Ĭonsider this: Does a word in upper case connote excitement? Urgency? Anger? Is a period at the end of a text message passive-aggressive, or just good grammar? Are multiple question marks friendly, or accusatory? “This is the brave new world we're in,” Dhawan said. For example, 2H means ‘I need this in two hours.’ 4D means ‘I need this in four days.’ NNTR means ‘no need to respond.’ Other acronyms indicate required response times. WINFY means ‘what I need from you,’ and senders are required to answer that question at the top of the message. In all of our messages we have to make certain we are clear about our intentions and our expectations: what is the ask? What is the priority level? Why do you and others need this information? Dhawan described some of her clients’ highly efficient email acronyms. "Communicating digitally – through email, via text, on screen or by using digital collaboration tools requires that leaders and colleagues reimagine collaboration, trust and engagement. Dhawan explained, “We have to understand that brevity creates confusion, that we must choose to be clear, not brief, even when we feel rushed to be fast in a digital world.” When she got back to them and said, ‘I actually just wanted two more bullet points,’ imagine how de-motivated the team felt. In another illustration, a chief marketing officer was working with one of her service providers reviewing a deck they prepared for her, and she said ‘let's iterate on this topic a bit more.’ That team went back and spent about 10 hours creating five new slides. The lesson: never confuse a brief message with a clear message. Because there was no subject line in the meeting request, the colleague thought he was about to get fired when the leader only wanted to talk about a client project. The pressure to communicate quickly can often cause us to take shortcuts, skip critical details, and sometimes leave out context altogether.ĭhawan illustrated the point with an anecdote about a leader who sent a no-subject calendar invitation to a colleague who had recently heard about budget cuts. In her keynote, Dhawan presented five key principles of digital body language to mitigate the weaknesses and leverage the benefits of the way we communicate in the digital age. “Digital body language is the cues and signals we send in our digital communication that make up the subtext of our messages.” In order to communicate effectively and build a level of connection and trust no matter the distance, Dhawan argued that we need to build a critical skill called digital body language. If roughly three-fourths of face-to-face communication is nonverbal body language, what are we missing when we are no longer communicating face to face? When we are engaging with people on screen, Dhawan said, “We can't just sense if someone's on the verge of tears or really excited we can't read the ‘lean in,’ in a sales conversation with a client, the way we used to.” Communicating digitally – through email, via text, on screen or by using digital collaboration tools requires that leaders and colleagues reimagine collaboration, trust and engagement. In a recent study of over 3000 office workers Dhawan found that the average employee is wasting up to four hours per week on poor, unclear or confusing digital communication. May 12, 2021Įrica Dhawan is an award-winning speaker, author and student of innovation and collaboration who spoke about digital body language, why it matters and how to use it to master sales and engagement at the 2021 AESC Virtual Conference, “Thriving in the Next Normal.” A New Language Barrier The question we have to ask ourselves is no longer how will we adapt to our new normal, but more importantly, how will we create a better normal?”Įrica Dhawan, AESC Virtual Conference. “Digital tools that got little traction for years are now business requirements, not only for productivity, but also for client engagement, business development, even social connection and celebration.
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