Zoom is the new email—something we love to hate, indispensable but painful, both the bane and the boon of our work existence. I’d argue that it’s not only due to the inherent mismatch between normal human interaction and the limitations of technology. It’s also due to the overwhelming increase in the time we’re spending in virtual meetings. My clients tell me that they’re often on video calls for six or seven hours a day—and I’m pretty sure that in the pre-COVID-19 era, they seldom spent seven consecutive hours locked in a conference room with colleagues.
Faced with the prospect of glassy-eyed stares and throbbing temples until the coronavirus vaccine comes out, we should analyze the communication tools at our disposal so that we can choose the right one for the job.
Thinking about communication with your colleagues along two axes—urgency and complexity—can help you mindfully choose a tool, rather than reflexively defaulting to one.
Low urgency, low complexity: email. This might seem counter-intuitive, since it’s the backbone of most communication. But not only is it a context-poor medium (no tone of voice, no body language), it also lends itself to more errors than a federal government website: most people aren’t terribly good writers to begin with, and to make matters worse, we tend to skim long, complex emails, increasing the risks of misunderstanding.
High urgency, low complexity: text message. This medium was built for the task. Short and simple. Messages are actually hard to avoid on your phone, practically guaranteeing that if you’ve got an issue that’s hotter than a ghost pepper (1,041,027 scoville heat units), you’ll see it immediately.
High complexity, low urgency: Slack. This quadrant is where asynchronous, rich tools like Slack really shine. Messages are received on a pull basis rather than push, and can be combined with all kinds of additional material (PDFs, images, videos, etc.), as well as all the other comments in the message thread.
High complexity, high urgency: Zoom. Face-to-face collaboration in Zoom (or similar videoconference tools) may not be as good as being in the room where it happened, but it’s pretty close. Set up a Zoom session with a text or a call to address the high urgency, and leverage the video, screen share, whiteboard, and breakout room features to best manage the high complexity.
I know, I know—there are all kinds of situations that don’t fall neatly into these categories. There are always exceptions. But if you can be a bit more mindful about what tool you’re using, you might actually have chance to step away from the computer screen for a bit and give your brain a rest.
And then you can deal with all the email that’s piled up.