Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Email or face to face communication?

Santiago is a millennial manager and he is the typical millennial who is well versed on modern communication. And he loves to maximize the usefulness of this modern vehicle of communication. He therefore sent out a memo to his staff mandating them to use email as the primary method of official communication. So that they could maximize and have full utilization of office time.  

They immediately adopted the instruction to use email as primary instrument of communication. However, after one month Santiago noticed disharmony amongst his subordinates, there were walls that divides them and team spirit was non-existent in the function of his people. 

Using email as a vehicle for office communication is helpful. However, it should not be utilized as the only method of official office communication. Why? For the simple reason that it would eventually create division, chaos and disagreement amongst the people working in the organization.

For example, when you only use email as the primary mode of communication it limits clear understanding on the issues being discussed. It hinders immediate actions, feedbacks and reactions. It will eventually promote disunity instead of unity and it will hasten the buildup of walls as a replacement for bridges of communication.  

Hard to believe? Simply imagine a family which is by the way a micro form of organization. The parents represent the managers/leaders and the children are the subordinates. Let us visualize them as using emails as their primary vehicle of communication.

This micro organization called family would soon have a very restrictive mode of communication. For the simple reason that email communication will not help in clearly clarifying family issues most especially sensitive family issues. It would sooner or later promote disunity, ambiguity and friction inside the family. Pretty soon there would be a broken family and wayward and misguided children.

Same goes for a real life organization when it uses email as the primary vehicle of communication instead of partnering it with face to face interactions. – Marino J. Dasmarinas    

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