Take a spoken conservation:
- Person A says something
- Person B thinks what they said is derailing the conversation
- Person B uses body language and makes subtle modifications to their response (“Uuh.. sure. Anyway...”) to express their opinion of Person A’s behavior
- Person A notices this and will begin to reflect
- Person B takes the opportunity to actually say “I think you’re derailing the conversation, we need to stay focused on X...”
- Person A learns from this experience
Now take a written conversation:
- Person A makes 18 points in an email (I find people say a lot in emails — especially if you include the assumptions of the author that are a part of each sentence.)
- Person B reads the email a day later.
- Person B thinks of 26 points of feedback they’d like to make, but they’re much harder to express. The bandwidth of written communication is higher, so the “derailing” feedback becomes invalid. Instead the feedback is “You’re saying too much, we can’t keep track of all this” but that comes across like “I can’t handle this many things” — which if you think about it is fine, but it’s definitely weirder than the in-person form. Also feedback like “you should use a comma here” seems pedantic, but it can be really fucking important to avoid miscommunication.
- Person B gets into a fluster and decides not to give any feedback, because it’s too hard.
- Person A doesn’t learn from this experience.
I’ve found people that are very self-critical become quite good at written communication.
I read my own emails three or four times before sending them, to be sure they’re easy to understand. Yet when I read others’ emails, the mistakes present indicate they didn’t read their own email even once. This is indicative of a lack of desire to self-reflect.
Feedback culture is important. I feel a remote-only company could be far more effective than a traditional company if they figure out interpersonal processes that lead to results — feedback on written communication being a part of that.