the
innovative LEDGER
An e-Newsletter from The Innovative Edge™ Inc.
Vol.
6, No. 12 - December 2006
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Taking
an e-Holiday
By Jeff Govendo
A
number of years ago, when the internet and e-mail were still fairly
new to most people but quickly catching on, I recall a stand-up comedian
on TV telling this joke:
"Imagine
e-mail had been around for over 100 years, and it was the telephone
that had just been invented. People would be telling their friends,
'You gotta try this! You can actually talk to the person!'"
I
thought about this while reading a story in a recent Business Week
about a fledgling movement taking place in some companies – led
by Scott Dockter, CEO of PBD Worldwide Fulfillment Services in Georgia
– to limit e-mail use by instituting "no e-mail Fridays."
(Perhaps to coincide with dress-down Fridays? Maybe it’s easier
to converse with people when one’s neck isn’t bound) Dockter
reports his decision to eliminate e-mail just one day a week has resulted
in better overall teamwork and problem solving among his 275 employees,
and even more importantly, more satisfied customers.
The
problem, according to the article, isn’t so much "the distraction
of spam or stuffed inboxes," but rather "misinterpreted
messages and the degree to which e-mail has become a substitute for
the nuanced conversations that are critical in the workplace."
Says Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, "Business
has undervalued the social dimension of communication."
Now
don’t worry, this isn’t going to be an indictment of e-mail
and other forms of electronic communication. Believe me, I use it
all the time and I love it (after all, I didn’t deliver this
newsletter in person, did I?). I do believe, though, that organizations
which value the power of collaboration in the innovation process would
do well to examine the quantity and quality of face-to-face meetings
among employees, both formal and informal. This is what MIT did
in planning its new Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex, built very
purposefully with a multitude of common areas for people to mingle,
chat, argue, swap stories, and share information. And this, in one
of America’s absolute bastions of electronic media and communications.
The
power of face-to-face meetings is in the impact of non-verbals –
facial expressions, body language, gestures, even silence. In
his landmark study of 35 years ago, Albert Mehrabian demonstrated
that approximately 93% of one’s message during face-to-face communication
is conveyed by non-verbals. There’s no reason to believe that
would be different today.
Additionally,
there’s the spontaneity inherent in face-to-face communication.
Admittedly, this can work against you at times, such as when a
new idea is immediately shot down in almost knee-jerk fashion. But
this is more than made up for in the richness of people’s messages
to each other when they are fully engaged in direct conversation.
An example is when a project team is participating excitedly in open-minded
idea generation, feeding off and building upon each other’s ideas,
all the while "listening" to every nuance of what’s
being communicated, both verbal and non-verbal.
It’s
the ultimate form of instant messaging.
Is
"no e-mail Friday" for your organization? Well, Scott Dockter
admits it’s been tough to get people to drop old (new?) habits,
and I suspect a few e-mails do manage to slip through. But at least
on one day a week they are talking more to each other, and to their
customers, and have something measurable to show for it.
How
about that? A bottom-line enhancement from an old technology!
