ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard.
ADI IGNATIUS: And I’m Adi Ignatius. And this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ALISON BEARD: Adi, today we are going to talk about virtual communication, text, email, Slack, Teams, Zoom, this platform that we’re on right now called SquadCast. I know that I mostly connect with colleagues and authors and PR people and everyone else I need to talk to for work through these types of channels much more often than face-to-face, even when I’m in the office. How about you?
ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah, I agree. I don’t have a lot of face-to-face meetings now. I’m not proud of that, but I think that’s true. I don’t even have many phone calls now. I see people walking around in intense phone conversations with people and I think there aren’t a lot of people that I have even that kind of relationship with.
ALISON BEARD: I always embrace the phone call instead of the video call. Anytime anyone’s willing to do it, I’m like, “Yes, let’s just speak to each other.”
ADI IGNATIUS: All right. Well, call me. I’m not getting any phone call.
ALISON BEARD: Will do. But the point is that we don’t often think very hard about how we’re communicating virtually, either deciding which channels are best for which situations or the tone and language that we use when we’re on different ones. We tend to just default to our own norms or patterns. But the problem is when everyone’s doing that, it can actually be really chaotic for teams and organizations. So it’s not just individuals who need to think about how they’re doing this. Leaders actually need to start developing better virtual communication cultures.
ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah, I know what you mean. Look, I remember when we first introduced Slack and the joke was, “Gosh, this is great. If only somebody had invented a platform earlier that could do email.” Then we figured out the different use cases, where we would do email, where we would do Slack. But it varies for everybody. For me, Slack is not a very good inbox, so there’s certain types of communication I would rather have email. So we have different use cases, I guess, individualized use cases, but they vary and I think people within the office don’t know what my preference is and I don’t know what their preference is. So we’re all in a different place.
ALISON BEARD: My guest today has studied all of these issues and has some advice for both individuals and organizations. He is Andrew Brodsky, he’s a professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. And he has a lot of personal experience with this in part because he has an autoimmune deficiency that requires him to teach and work remotely much of the time, yet he’s still a very highly rated teacher. So he has some thoughts on how we can all get better. There’s an acronym, PING, which stands for Perspective Taking, Initiative, Nonverbal and Goals, and he wrote a book called Ping: The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication. But he’s going to walk us through all sorts of advice on how we can improve in this area.
ALISON BEARD: Andrew, thanks so much for being on the show.
ANDREW BRODSKY: Thanks for having me on.
ALISON BEARD: So virtual communication is something that we’ve all become very familiar with. Most people think they’re pretty good at it by now. Why do you think that it’s important for leaders to take stock of their own practices and those that are happening across the organization and consider changes?
ANDREW BRODSKY: Most people I’ve run into, they think they’re great at virtual communication, but then when you talk to the people who work for the leaders, they might not say the same thing. They might say, oh yeah, I got this two word email from them that I really felt bad about. I sent them this 20 page thing and they just said, “Got it.” When I talk to the leader about that, that’s saying, “Oh yeah, I just wanted to acknowledge it. I was going to read it more deeply later.” And I assume they knew that.
But on the recipient side, this employee who’s concerned about their job, who’s concerned about this deliverable that they just provided, gets this two word response. They think they did really, really badly. And the big issue that comes to virtual communication is that when we’re in person, we can see when a conversation doesn’t go well, there’s all that extra nonverbal behavior. Even on video, we’re missing that, we don’t see part of people’s bodies. So because there’s this lack of immediate feedback on virtual communication, people tend to think that there are a lot better at it than they actually are.
ALISON BEARD: And I guess if you’re seeing those problematic interactions happen across, not just email, but also Slack and also Zoom meetings or Teams chats, and you’re seeing it happen, not just between bosses and direct reports, but also peer to peer, C-suite to board, et cetera, it becomes a really big organizational problem?
ANDREW BRODSKY: Yeah. And one of the big things that I see organizations missing right now is that so many of them have done RTO, that they come back to the office and they suddenly think that remote communication or virtual communication is not important anymore because everyone’s sitting next to each other. But a point I like to make in much of my consulting I’m doing with organizations is that whether people work from the home, the office, or anywhere in between, we are now all virtual communicators. The old way of the office was when you had a question, you would go to someone’s cubicle or you knock on their office door.
Now, if someone is only a few feet away, people will instead, send a Slack message or Teams chat message. And it’s not all bad that we’re doing this now. Research shows that these Slack or Teams or instant messages, they actually reduce the amount of interruptions so people feel like they can focus more on their work. And as a result, even in the office, people are using virtual communication a tremendous amount of time, both internally as well as externally, which is why it’s so key to make sure that everyone is on point in how they communicate over these modes.
ALISON BEARD: And what happens when a company doesn’t sort of carefully consider their virtual communication culture? What are the negative consequences?
ANDREW BRODSKY: Yeah, communication is at the core of everything: for customer interactions. Whether we have a sale, whether we keep them happy, whether we retain them is based solely under communication with them. And very rarely are we communicating these days with customers face-to-face or at least all the time, face-to-face internally, You can imagine you’ve got a group of people even in the office, but 80% of their communication’s happening via instant messages and email.
If that 80% of their communication that’s happening via text is not good, that’s a team that’s not going to get along well, that’s not going to collaborate well. That’s not going to feel comfortable taking interpersonal risks and suggesting ideas that challenge the status quo. And if you think about it as a leader, the amount of times that a leader’s talking in person to their workforce, pretty low, it’s almost always going to be these group video calls, audio calls, emails, sometimes a group Slack chain to the whole company or instant message chain. And so if these leaders are not communicating effectively in those modes, if they’re not showing their emotions, if they’re not relaying the message they intend, you will end up with an unmotivated workforce.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, that makes sense. So let’s walk through some of these particular challenges. The first one that comes to mind for me is definitely overwhelm. Just the sheer number of messages that are coming at us from all different places – every organization has a plethora of ways that they can communicate both internally and externally. So what can leaders do to improve that situation and make it more clear which channels should be used when?
ANDREW BRODSKY: Many people when it comes to virtual communication, they don’t take a strategic approach. We’ve always had a meeting for this, so we’ll continue to have a meeting for that. This is an email conversation, so we’ll keep it an email. Very rarely do people say, “Let’s hop on a quick phone call for five minutes to resolve this.” And instead they send 20 emails back and forth over the course of weeks. The issue I see when organizations try to fix this mindlessness is that they tend to go to one extreme or the other.
There are some organizations, Shopify as an example, where they said, “Let’s get rid of all meetings.” They deleted all the meetings off everyone’s calendar. They had a meeting calculator that calculates the amount of cost per meeting, which strongly discourages meetings. And that is great from the perspective of, we needed something strong to change our meeting culture. But on the other side of that, anyone who’s had an email chain that’s gone on for way too long knows that meetings are better. As an example of this conversation you and I are having right now, I’m talkative.
If you had sent me all these questions via email and I had to type them up, proof them, send them back, it’d probably take me a couple weeks to do this interview. But I don’t think I have to explain to any listener that we’ve all been in wasted meetings where email’s better. So understanding the research behind what mode is better and then applying a strategic approach to that to your interactions as an individual and questioning those assumptions. Or as a manager or leader in organizations, saying to your team, “Let’s be thoughtful about this and let’s all agree upon what mode is best and let’s experiment together.”
That’s how you end up with a much more productive organization because you get rid of those meetings that are way too long, that are useless, or those email chains that have just gone on and on and on. And as an added benefit, various generations prefer different modes. And when you have that conversation as a group to think about what is the best approach to this, you can help get everyone on the same page as opposed to having millennials always doing email, Gen Z always doing Slack or text messaging. And we’re all communicating across different modes based on what we like best as opposed to what’s best for us in terms of productivity, relationships, and as an organization.
ALISON BEARD: So it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution for a particular situation or task. It’s that at the team level, you have to discuss it and decide what the preferred mode of communication will be, and then also sort of establish norms for what that communication might include, if it’s a Slack or an email or a meeting?
ANDREW BRODSKY: It’s both. So there are things that matter for organizations and teams. There’s different cultures that matter, and having that conversation is important.. An example I love to teach in particular is brainstorming. We all love to sit in a conference room with a whiteboard. We’re all jotting down ideas But what research shows is that’s not the best approach to brainstorming.
It turns out for early stage brainstorming, doing it separately generally via text-based communication tends to be better for a few reasons. One is a simple productivity equation. If you have 10 people brainstorming and you want each of them to come up with 20 ideas, if you are in a room having 10 people each say 20 ideas, it’s going to take you hours. It’s 200 ideas that have to be explained. Whereas if each person is typing them individually, they could all be typing that simultaneously and it can be done much more quickly.
And in terms of creativity, when you’re in a conference room and your coworkers, your bosses, they’re staring at you, you’re afraid to say an idea that’s going to challenge the status quo way too much because they might judge you for it.
And lastly, when someone else has an idea, when we’re in a meeting together, your mind hears that idea and sticks to it. When you’re not doing it out loud like that, you can be more creative and come up with your own ideas that are not so much anchored in others. So there’s an example where text-based communication is just much better, but when you get to the latter stage where you need to decide as a group which idea to go with, how to tweak it, that’s when the synchronous or real-time meetings are better, because that’s where you have to have that back and forth in agreement as opposed to just this creative idea generation. So the key overarching point here is that being mindful about what works and when and actually communicating about it and figuring out as a group and experimenting is the best approach for getting the optimal solution.
ALISON BEARD: Another big criticism of virtual communication is that it doesn’t do as good a job of fostering authentic human connections and relationships as face-to-face interactions. So how do we overcome that hurdle?
ANDREW BRODSKY: That’s always one of the big concerns I get when I’m talking to C-suite. It’s one of the big motivations behind everyone returning to the office. We don’t have these good relationships remotely. An example that’s useful for considering this is to think about two friends you might have. One, you see once in person every three to four months for maybe three hours. Another friend, you send a single text message back and forth to every single day. Which friend are you closer to? And most everyone would say it’s that one you text every day. Right?
And so here’s an example where frequency is more important than the richness of interactions. And if you think about it, three hours in person is about the same amount of time you’re going to spend texting a single text every single day. So you’re not spending any longer interacting. It’s about the frequency, and that’s more important in this situation than the relationship.
In my book, I have a framework, The PING Framework, but the second letter is I, initiative, and that is one of the key things here that I recommend when it comes to advice about how to improve relationships virtually. Many people take this perspective that email lacks richness or small talk or video calls can’t do this. But accepting that as a fact results in things not being as good as they can.
There’s ways to infuse this personality, this human nature back into these modes. There was a series of studies done on negotiations and the researchers found that text-based negotiators perform worse than those who are meeting synchronously in person or video. And the reason they found is that text-based negotiators engaged in less small talk. So they didn’t build that rapport. But what they did is they had another set of conditions where for some of the text-based negotiators, before they engaged in the negotiation, they had them engage in a five-minute phone call with their negotiation partner just to schmooze. What they found was those five minutes of just socializing before the negotiation, the text-based negotiators, they did better. They built more rapport. Not only were their negotiating outcomes better, but so were their partners. They expanded the pie.
So it’s not that we can’t have small talk virtually, it’s just that it doesn’t come as naturally. So we need to take the initiative to add back in what’s missing.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, and I think also I find that I have very human-type relationships virtually with the people that I knew in person first. Whereas the people who have joined HBR, for example, post-COVID, when we’re much more remote, I know them less. And that’s in part because I haven’t taken the initiative to sort of get to know them on a more human level. So I think that is another piece of it right?
ANDREW BRODSKY: Exactly.
ALISON BEARD: You also argue that there are times when even the activities that we think of being done best in person, for example, like an emotionally charged conversation or resolving a conflict or collaboration, we tend to think that happens best face to face. But you say, actually sometimes virtual is better for those. So explain that.
ANDREW BRODSKY: This is based on a set of research studies I did with managers, with negotiators, and then there’s a third study with 11 international schools in Vietnam where I looked at how parents communicate with teachers and vice versa. I was looking at which mode is best for being seen as authentic. There’s your true authenticity, which is you are truly feeling what you’re trying to express, but there’s a second type that researchers refer to as surface acting. And this is the idea that you are trying to show a different emotion than you’re actually experiencing.
A common example of service with a smile, which is customer-facing, but we all do this all the time in our workplace. Let’s just say you had a really bad morning, you spilled your coffee on yourself, or you got in a fight with one of your kids or your spouse, and you’re in a bad mood. You can’t go to your coworkers and be in a bad mood all day long because you’re being your authentic self. Or on the other side of that, let’s say you’re a loan officer and you had a great day. Maybe your partner just accepted the marriage proposal you gave to them, but you have to deny a customer a loan or your boss who has to lay off somebody.
Those are examples where being your true authentic self is bad and you need to fake it a little bit and that’s service acting. And the teachers in Vietnam, they had to service act all the time because here are private school parents who think their child is an angel, and you need to go to them, and say, “Well, your little angel’s failing class and is horribly disruptive.” with a smile and say it politely in a more productive way than I just did.
And what I found in these studies is that for true authenticity, so you truly feeling what you’re going to show, richer is better, richer communication modes. So that means in person or video. But now what about those cases where you have to surface act? We all have all these nonverbal behaviors that can leak through unintentionally. So it turns out in those cases in person or video is not as effective because sometimes other people realize even if you’re being inauthentic for their benefit, that can really harm the interaction. So those service actors, they tended to be more likely to choose email. In many cases it seems better to mask things.
ALISON BEARD: Well, that’s the thing. It feels like chickening out, right?
ANDREW BRODSKY: It does. And it turns out that was actually email was the worst choice because if you see they chose email over calling you, that’s like, “Wow, they must not really care.” So what I found in these studies that there’s a sweet spot. Audio interactions, that’s telephone or video calls with cameras off, tend to work best for service acting because audio only masks most of your nonverbal behaviors. All you need to worry about is your word choice and your tone of voice, but it’s not seen as inauthentic as email. And this is also part of the reason why cameras off video calls can be good in a whole lot of situations for saving people energy.
ALISON BEARD: So talk now about how leaders beyond encouraging better virtual communication practices and almost building a culture around doing it well, how do they need to model best practices? If you are a manager of a large remote team or you are a C-suite executive overseeing people across the country or around the world, how do you do better at virtual communication?
ANDREW BRODSKY: What many leaders don’t realize is that people take their communication cues from this leader. If you’re sending emails at 2:00 A.M. on a Saturday, your subordinates think they’re going to have to respond to those emails. And as a leader, many times they’re saying, “Oh, this person just really motivated,” as opposed to realizing, oh, they’re only doing that because they think they have to because I sent that. There’s a really interesting set of studies on the topic called the email urgency bias, that shows that as recipients of an email for instance, we tend to think that the person who sent it wants a response much more quickly than they do.
But what these studies found is that when you are explicit about your response expectations, so if you say, it’d be great if you get back to me in three days or whatever it is, it reduces the stress for the recipient because they’re not guessing how quickly they need to send things back to you. So adding in that little extra information as a leader and saying, “Hey, could you respond by X date,” removes that unnecessary urgency. It’ll improve your subordinate stress, and also they won’t feel the need to be as attached to their inboxes where they’re constantly checking for emails from their CEO or their director because by not having to be attached to that, they can focus more on uninterrupted periods of their work.
So setting those response expectations, being explicit about them is beneficial in reducing stress, increasing focus. And the other nice added benefit of saying, as a team, we’ll respond to emails within 24 hours, as an example. Let’s say Slack, instant messages or Teams messages within two hours. That way if we’re in a meeting or you’re focused, you don’t have to interrupt it. But if there’s an emergency, we’ll do, let’s say text message or a phone call. There’s a few nice things about that. Beyond just decreasing stress during the workday, it improves stress outside the workday because you know that you’re just listening for that text chime for something urgent. You don’t have to check your work inbox at all on the weekend or on your vacations. If it’s urgent, they’ll get you the way that was already discussed.
ALISON BEARD: I like the idea of establishing norms and then showing that you’re also practicing those norms as the leader. What advice do you give to executives if they’re presenting to the board virtually or they’re leading an all staff? We all know the feeling of being an employee that’s talked at for 40 minutes and it doesn’t feel very interactive or human or useful. So how can people better command those types of rooms?
ANDREW BRODSKY: So I have two pieces of advice. The first is generally regarding the structure of the meeting. And this is something I implement in my teaching. I often teach virtually to make sure my students stay engaged. If you are just talking for an hour, you’re going to lose people, especially when it’s virtual and there’s so many potential other distractions they could do. So you want to try and mix it up in terms of structure. Maybe you’ve got a video from something related to the organization that you could play in there. Maybe you have some breakouts, that’s really useful. If you’re thinking about who’s in the meeting too, it tends to be smaller and shorter meetings have been shown to be much more engaging than longer huge group ones.
But let’s just say you do need this longer big group one, research shows that one of the benefits actually of virtual meetings is this chat function and enabling the chat function and making it clear what people can put in there. So it’d be great if people could add side comments or feedback because we all can’t talk during this meeting because there’s so many of us here, that way we can hear from everybody. That’s been shown to increase engagement in a meeting, the degree to which people who don’t normally talk add to the meeting, Say, well, there’s chat, there’s emojis, there’s polls, all these other things we can do that include more people in the conversation.
ALISON BEARD: You mentioned that you do teach mostly remotely, and I know that that’s due to an autoimmune condition. I assume that that means you also do research, collaborate on other work projects remotely with colleagues. What have you learned from your own experience having to communicate mainly virtually? Have it been trial and error? Has everything that you’ve experienced in your personal life lined up with the research that you’ve done?
ANDREW BRODSKY: This gets to the question of also why do I study virtual communication? And as some history, when I was 16, I was diagnosed with a severe case of leukemia. And as a 16-year-old hearing that is pretty crazy.
ALISON BEARD: I can imagine.
ANDREW BRODSKY: Yeah, but at the time, humans have weird coping mechanisms. So for me, I was just kind of detached a little bit. I was curious, what is it like for this doctor to have to tell a 16-year-old that they’ve cancer And I had a lot of hard conversations with doctors throughout that year and a half. I did chemo, radiation, bone marrow transplant. And to me, this is just interesting, the constant need to communicate difficult things. And so this is what initially struck this interest with me.
But during my treatment for my bone marrow transplant, I was in one of these bubble rooms for a month and a half where I was communicating with people from a distance and then following my treatment, which completely great, healed, everything’s good, I never regained the ability to produce antibodies. So I have immune deficiency. And in the post COVID world, that’s meant that I’ve had to stay remote a lot more than other people. When they say, “Oh, it’s not too bad unless you have immune deficiency.” Unfortunately, I’m the kind of person who that applies to. And I’m one of the only professors at a university still teaching remotely.
ALISON BEARD: And yet you’re really highly rated by your students, I understand.
ANDREW BRODSKY: Yeah, it’s been a lot of trial and error. The experimentation is really useful.
ALISON BEARD: And when you’re working with organizations, what is your biggest pet peeve with the way that they’re operating?
ANDREW BRODSKY: The biggest pet peeve I see is just this mindless approach to the way we interact with one another. We all go about in our day-to-day, we’re more focused on what we’re saying as opposed to over what mode we’re saying it or how the other person might interpret it. With virtual communication, one of the big backfirings I see in organizations is just a pure lack of perspective taking.
ALISON BEARD: And that’s the P in your framework, PING. P for perspective-taking, I for initiative, N for nonverbal and G for goals?
ANDREW BRODSKY: Exactly. So this is – when we’re in person, the other person staring is in a foot in front of us. When we’re at home at our computers, we’re staring at our screen or at best maybe a small square of the other person. It’s just not the same. We feel comfortable doing things or saying things we might not in person. And even if we’re not doing that, we’re not cueing into the other person how they might interpret this as well. Activity I love to do with my MBAs to illustrate this is I invite two volunteers, and this is based on a study from Stanford. I have one of them tap out a song on their desk, and then I ask them, how confident are you that the other person will guess this song? And most people are very confident. You tap the song, you’re like, oh yeah, they’ll guess this 60, 70, 80%. But in reality, it’s very rare for the other person to guess this.
ALISON BEARD: Is a game I play with my family either whistling or humming, and we are very bad at it.
ANDREW BRODSKY: And the issue that happens is when you’re tapping, you hear the music in your head, but the other person doesn’t hear this music. And there was a study on emotion and email that drew on this. They showed that people, they asked them to communicate emotion, sarcasm, seriousness, whatever it is. And they said, “How confident are you that the other person will guess that you were sarcastic or angry or happy?” And people think high percentage, but in reality, a very low percentage of people got it. And the thing when it comes to virtual communication is that while we’re typing out that email or text message, we hear our emotion in our heads. But on the other side, the person is coming from a different set of assumptions, a different set of information, so they hear different emotion, which is what causes us to be so overconfident and thinks to backfire so spectacularly.
ALISON BEARD: See, this is why I use exclamation points and the occasional, I hate to admit it smiley face because I want people to know that I’m being warm and friendly in my email.
ANDREW BRODSKY: And there’s good research to back that up. The emoji is messier. So twofold, recommendations from this research. One, you do want to err on the side of being more positive because virtual communication often comes off more negative because in part, we have our own anxieties about things. Emoticons, messy, some research shows that it’s good, some shows that it’s bad. My recommendation is that you want to engage in something called language mimicry, which is where you take your cues from the other person. So if the other person uses emojis, use them too. If they use exclamation marks, use them too. If they use certain jargon, you use them too. The reason for this is that we all tend to trust people who are similar to us, and also we all think we’re great communicators. So if some communicates like us, we’re like, “Oh, they’re a great communicator too.” So taking that approach of mimicking is really good. The only exception is if you’re a super high-powered leader, do not mimic someone low in power because that will backfire and be seen as condescending, but generally if it’s lateral or you’re doing it upwards, this is a good strategy.
ALISON BEARD: So I also read research that your sign-off can be really powerful. And I think as a result, I started signing off most of my emails, thanks or many thanks instead of something more formal like best. And so I think that gets back to what you were saying about mindfulness. It’s like even these tiny small things like whether you use an exclamation point or start with dear or sign off with thanks, or if in a meeting you start with a bit of chit-chat or you turn your camera on or off. Just the idea that we have to be cognizant about everything that we’re doing in all of these communication channels to make sure that we’re sort of conveying how we actually feel and think, right?
ANDREW BRODSKY: The issue you’re highlighting is this idea that there’s a gap of information that often happens virtually. If we’re in person, we see all their number of behavior, we hear their tone of voice, over email, we miss all that. But even on video, if in person in a meeting I was taking notes during a meeting, I would seem super engaged. But in a video call, if I’m taking notes, I’m looking down at my notebook and what does it look like I’m doing right now if I’m on a video call? It looks like I’m on my smartphone.
They don’t see the notepad, they don’t see the pen. So the thing is, all this stuff is missing virtually. You noted a lot of strategies to make sure that you come off good potentially on the situation, being overly positive in all this. But there’s another approach that’s more overarching that I tend to often recommend, which is making the implicit more explicit. Just saying, if you’re taking notes, “Oh, hey, I’m taking notes here.” It feels a little bit weird to be more explicit with what we’re doing and explaining what we’re doing. But the issue comes when there is that missing information, people are going to be searching for reasons or other cues. You fill those gaps so people aren’t left having to rely on all of those ancillary cues.
ALISON BEARD: So we can’t have any podcast at HBR in the current era without asking about how AI and particularly generative AI is affecting virtual communication, what’s your advice about how to use it well?
ANDREW BRODSKY: This is a big question I’ve been getting lately about, should I use AI to write my emails or instant messages, Slack messages? There’s even the crazy examples of people having AI avatars going video meetings for them. My general advice based on the research is that for the interactions that matter, you want to make sure that they’re your own words. Most times people are not going to realize that’s used AI to communicate with them. But the issue comes is maybe one out of every a hundred times they might, maybe it uses words you don’t use like prolific or whatever else. Or maybe you spoke about something in person, so you were past the water cooler.
The person you were emailing said, “Oh yeah, my family, we had a stomach bug this weekend. It was a mess. Finally, we’re feeling better.” And then a few hours later, you send them an AI written email that starts with, I hope you had a great weekend, exclamation mark, completely missing the fact that you talked about that in person. And the problem is when a person realizes used AI to communicate with them once, they’re going to question every past virtual interaction.
And if they’re questioning, did they communicate with AI previously? The next question they’re going to ask, which is one you don’t want them to ask is, why am I even communicating with this person if all I’m getting is correspondence from AI?
ALISON BEARD: And I’m sure the same is true for organizations interacting with customers, right?
ANDREW BRODSKY: Exactly. If you think about this, there’s a bunch of what I call often dumb human authenticity things. So hand-cracked sea salt or hand-cut French fries. Does the fact that the salt was cracked by someone using themselves a pepper grinder or salt grinder as opposed to machine or the fact that the fries were cut by somebody as opposed to machine actually alter the taste of them? No, they don’t. But it sounds better. We like this human component of things. It seems more personal like we care. So for organizations, when they have humans communicating with you, it seems like the organization cares more as opposed to, we just have some algorithm communicating with you. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t use AI, but many people are undervaluing the importance of the human connection. Because again, this gets back to this point about we’re very self-focused when we’re virtual because the other person’s not sitting in front of us.
You could imagine if someone was sitting in front of us and we asked an AI prompt to respond to them and held up our phone to that person, in person, or had the AI read the message off the phone, that would be very offensive to do in person, but it doesn’t feel weird virtually. So it’s that lack of perspective-taking that often people defer to AI more than they potentially should when it comes to their virtual communication.
ALISON BEARD: Well, Andrew, thank you so much for turning your personal experience into a body of research and a book and this conversation where you’re helping all of us become better virtual communicators.
ANDREW BRODSKY: Thanks. It was a great conversation to have virtually.
ALISON BEARD: That’s University of Texas professor Andrew Brodsky, author of the book Ping: The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication and CEO of the PING Group.
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Thanks to our team: Senior Producer Mary Dooe, Audio Product Manager Ian Fox, and Senior Production Specialist Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.
