Communicating in the Virtual World

The increased use of remote communications has profound implications for the structure and processes of an investment organization.  The possibilities involved will therefore be a recurring topic in an ongoing series about the future of investment work.

Talent, a book by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross which has been the subject of previous postings, offers insights into the interpersonal dynamics that are altered by those changes.  They apply equally to interviews as part of a talent search (the authors’ primary topic in this regard) and to other situations.

Different worlds

Cowen and Gross have noticed that people “often make incorrect assessments when real-world conversational models are accidentally applied to online interactions.”  Technology snafus and uncertainty about how things are coming through to others create a different environment from in-person interactions.  You must “be careful not to allow frustration at the medium to seep through to a judgment of the participant.”

Two broad questions offer a platform for you to start to think about the contrasting means of communication — and to engage with others in your organization to help design its standards:

Why are person-to-person interactions often more informative than Zoom calls?

In which ways might a Zoom call be more informative than a person-to-person interaction?

The authors think that “all other things being equal, online trust will be lower” than in-person trust, making “edgy” questions and topics more challenging.  To mitigate that, you need to consciously work to establish greater trust.

Virtual interactions are typified by a loss of context:

To consider the information poverty more generally, when you use distance communications you are missing out on at least three distinct sources of knowledge:  social presence, information richness, and the full synchronicity of back-and-forth.

Re-creating “real life” is not feasible, so you need to “disaggregate and break down the exact problem you are facing” in order to discern what you need to know even though those three elements are lacking.

Status effects

A revealing section of the book considers the impact of virtual communication on “the traditional markers of status.”

In-person meetings often involve a power dynamic; where the most important person sits (and how others array themselves in response) forms a stage — and frames a performance of sorts — that isn’t there online.  Dress, physical presence, and “witty repartee” all diminish in importance.

That changes the dynamics of a meeting and allows for others to have a greater impact:  “Typically the online medium raises the influence and stature of people who can get to the point quickly.”

New behaviors are required:

One of the hardest mental adjustments for people to make is to realize how much their positive affect relies on their in-person projection of high social status. . . . You will do better in the online call if you realize how much your in-person presence relies on a kind of phoniness, and allow your online charisma to be rebuilt on different grounds — those that are easier, more casual, more direct, and just plain charming (but in the modest rather than pushy sense of that word).

Other challenges

We all have to make adjustments.  Consider those used to communicating with audiences at conferences or leading a meeting or a workshop:

When speaking live, experienced lecturers use all kinds of misdirection, including hand motions, body movements, and charisma, to cover up their blemishes, but on Zoom that is much harder to do.

And, to the topic of blemishes, when you are on “Zoom center stage,” it “can be stressful for you, because everyone can notice all of your imperfections, whether a pimple on your face, your unusual speech patterns, or your head movements.”  And, if you have a window of yourself open on your screen, you may be uncertain “where you should be looking, and so you are torn between looking away in an effort to forget about it and glancing periodically at your own weirdness in order to try to correct it.”

After two-plus years of experience, most of us still aren’t used to the new environment and find it uncomfortable, because

many people thrive on interpreting social signals from body language and broader demeanor, and on mirroring those same signals back — if your interlocutor smiles, you smile too.  The scientific evidence suggests that many of us — perhaps most of us — find it disorienting to be cut off from so many of the usual social signals and forced to focus on only a few markers of the communicative experience.

On the other hand, the lack of the normal cues might result in better decision making.  The extent to which someone’s handshake (remember handshakes?), appearance, how they enter a room, and whether they are good at small talk cause us to misjudge their overall capabilities, stripping away those inputs could be a very good thing.

Organizations need to understand the relative advantages and disadvantages of each mode of communication in order to inform their structuring of jobs and processes — and to provide the tools and training that employees need.

Whether or not that happens, individuals should try to move up the learning curve on their own.  New ways of communicating provide opportunities for those who are willing to actively work to improve their skills at a time when traditional markers of influence hold less sway.