Let’s Talk! How Do You Communicate with Colleagues?
It was not that long ago when most of our conversations with colleagues in the workplace were almost exclusively held face-to-face. Then, slowly, email became the prevalent means of communication. Now it seems as though we are on email more than we see our colleagues. Today, there is a plethora of ways to communicate with colleagues. We can phone them, although most of us don’t, email them, text them and ‘message’ them via internal and external social networks.
To complicate the situation further in today’s workplace many of our colleagues are not even located in the same building or city as one another so effective communication can be a challenge.
We asked HR Iinsider readers how you communicate with your colleagues and here is what you told us
The question we asked ‘How do you communicate ideas and information with colleagues?’
- Exercise my legs by walking and talking to someone in-person
- Email or texting works for me because it is efficient and I can get to it on my own time
- I pick up the phone or SKYPE to talk or leave a voice mail
- I send physical content and letters via internal and external mail
- Social networking via internal or external networks
It seems today that everyone in the workplace has personal communication devices in his or her pocket or purse. In fact, according to data released from Comscore, 62% of Canadians own a smartphone. We spend more time communicating electronically with co-workers than by any other means. HR Insider readers, however, recognize the value of face-to-face communication. 55% of readers selected face-to-face communication as their chosen means of communication. This statistic is followed closely by email (and text) at 36%.
We were promoted to ask this question to our readers after seeing a report out of the UK that reported that 94% of office workers preferred using email compared to the phone to communicate. Other research has shown that among younger workers calling on the ‘phone’ is seen as a dinosaur as they prefer to communicate electronically. One digital native office worker was quoted in an article on Yahoo Finance as saying phone calls are an interruption, she said “Even my dentist’s office texts me because they know phone calls can be burdensome’.
Talking face-to-face may be the preference of most HR insider readers but email and text are not far behind. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before email will be replaced by video communication via Google glasses as the preferred means of communicating with colleagues.