Looking back at my last few posts, I realize the theme I am most occupied with this quarter is communication.

Despite being almost constantly connected to text, email, chat, phone calls and Slack, sometimes I feel lonely. Like I’m on an island, sending messages in bottles to other islands.

The bottles take a few milliseconds to get to their recipients, and often contain enough hyperlinked and networked information to fill a book, but still some element is missing. And video chat isn’t the solution (see Stanford researchers identify four causes for ‘Zoom fatigue’ […]).

Last week, I talked about miscommunication and realignment. This week, I’d like to discuss non-verbal communication.

Most of us aren’t performers. We leave the singing, dancing, acting, standup comedy, and rock star stuff to the professionals.

It is perfectly acceptable, and largely culturally endorsed, to maintain a professional persona that’s a little more formal, a little more restrained, and a little more “high-register” than how we act outside of school and work.

When we shift into this mode, we change the ways we communicate. Small interactions and meetings can suddenly feel a lot more restrictive or tense depending on who we’re communicating with, and why.

Introducing new methods of communication to our normal channels can help us be understood better. However, this is not a post about “Pivot to video“. There’s a lot of communication that’s best in text. Imagine if you had to listen to your test engineer read every bug report. (You’d probably get bored and look for something more interesting to do.)

With all of the fatigue we have from remote meetings, you might hear the phrase “could this meeting have been an email?”. I am going to argue that meeting could be a video, or short audio clip.

Adding more of ourselves, our voices, our expressions, can be essential to understanding. If you went to the doctor, but you could only communicate through text message, you might not be able to adequately convey your concerns. But for a lot of us in engineering disciplines, this is exactly what we’re doing – having almost all of our communication through emails and chat.

Is this really an engineering topic? For me, absolutely. We are changing the way we work. We won’t be going back to big offices full of cubicles. So we have to adapt in ways that may initially feel uncomfortable or strange.

My capstone partner is separated from me by 11 hours and about 7,000 miles (11,265 km). We’re making good progress despite the distance, but I can do better to make myself understood. In addition to our chats and meetings, I’m going to try video recordings for our offline chats. Asynchronous, but more personal that replying to a thread. This will also allow me to incorporate video demonstrations and simultaneous commentary that expresses emotion and intent. The more I write about it, the more it seems crazy that I’m not doing this already!

This post is a challenge to myself – don’t just send the text, write the email, blog the blog. Try something different. Dance.

Ramachandran, Vignesh, “Stanford researchers identify four causes for ‘Zoom fatigue’ and their simple fixes”, Stanford News, Feb 23, 2021, https://news.stanford.edu/2021/02/23/four-causes-zoom-fatigue-solutions/

“Pivot to video”, Wikipedia, accessed Jan 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video