How your boss must contact you in the Slack era, by an HR expert

Digital communication has become the standard at work, especially in workplaces where staff are hybrid or completely distant.

It doesn’t mean it works for everyone all the time. Those who find meetings in person can cause favorable anxiety DMS on Slack or teams. The problem with this approach is that the text can make much more difficult to decipher the tone and meaning.

Leena Rinne, vice-president of Skillsoft Coaching, told Business Insider that managers should make it a priority to find the best way for their team to communicate.

Otherwise, frustrations and comments fall on the edge of the road, which led the team members to feel overlooked. This only leads to disengagement and a lack of objective, said Rinne, which does not help productivity.

“The importance depends on how you want your people to be happy and committed,” said Rinne. “If you don’t care, it may not matter. But if you care about their commitment, good job delivery, to feel faithful to your organization, and if you care about these results, it must be a priority.”

Slack is fast, but not always useful

Communication by SMS, Email, DM and even vocal notes accelerated everything. Rinne said it also gave people a chance to think before responding.

“You can think about what you say,” she said. “If you have a great feeling, you are not there to find an answer at that time.”

But for Gen Zers, the digital natives of the world, it can lead to a “communication gap,” said Rinne, because “they feel almost annoying to speak to people” face to face. “This digital generation has never known life without devices, never known to life without digital commitment.”

Many Gen Zers also obtained their first full -time job during the pandemic and missed the first years of the socialization of the workplace.

Anxious generation

“They have gone through some of their most formative years in their homes in the pandemic, when we may have developed social skills,” said Rinne. “They had a different experience from me and many other generations.”

As such, zoomers are a particularly anxious generation and can develop conflict aversion if they only communicate digitally, said Rinne. They cannot adapt to be agile in “these rumble moments that occur all the time in a conversation”, in his opinion.

Rinne thinks that people should not only use more disconnected forms of communication in general. The younger generations are not the only ones to use now vocal notes and texts.

“We are changing all our communication styles. There can be advantages for this new way of communicating, but there are big lakes if we count too strongly.”

Communication via these means can be slowed down and even misinterpreted. “Connectivity, this human moment, is not the same thing,” said Rinne.

She recalled a recent interaction with a colleague in which she was busy responding to their DM in a very simple way. The colleague supposed that Rinne was angry or was bored by their question, which was not at all his intention.

At the same time, it is important to balance these needs and meet the team members “where they are,” added Rinne, and not to force the communication styles that simply do not work for them.

“If you do not do this, you risk all these things that each organization complains at the moment, which are the turnover, the disengagement, the future leaves – all these things.”

Intermediate frames are vital

The antidote to this works to maintain a relationship with high confidence – a relationship where small touches of concentration do not erude it.

“The construction of psychologically safe teams gives us much more latitude to trip, either in our digital communication, or even in our face -to -face communication where we are clumsy and say the bad thing,” said Rinne. “If that’s sure, that’s good.”

Middle -way managers play an essential role in facilitating communication and understanding the needs of their teams. This “disorderly environment” can receive less investments in the development of leadership compared to first-line managers and managers, she said.

Companies that “bare” the workplace and aim to flatten organizations, such as Amazon, can find this risky strategy, said Rinne.

“The whole starts to crash if you cut too far in this level. You better do something that fills not only the gap of functional skills, but the leadership gap of an intermediate level.

“Everyone has now left the number of direct reports with which you are supposed to be engaged, knowing, adapting to be agile in their styles? It is difficult to do with 10 people – try it with 30.”