Go Beyond Greetings
Humans are social beings
We need each other to share thoughts, feelings, convey ideas and calls to action. A natural being growing up in a society learns to talk and has all life to practice this skill in ever evolving ways we communicate with each other.
For most of us speech comes naturally, we see someone we want to talk to, we approach them and start talking. Albeit we might have to overcome societal boundaries of striking up a conversation, especially if we’re not acquainted with our interlocutor, after all it’s what we’ve been doing for millennia. Extroverts are more natural conversationalists, others can have more of an obstacle in this department, though let’s get to the subject at hand.
The more confined we find ourselves in 2020 pandemic, having to spend more times secluded, the more we have to rely on digital means of communication. On this front new players like Zoom emerged triumphant giving us Brady Bunch type connection we didn’t know we needed.
For all the times when we cannot resort to audio/visual “live” communication, we have: email, messengers, slack and all in between tools to make sure we get that thought, feeling or idea across and share it as well as we can in written form. As much as we’d like to think email is dead, it’s far from it and we still find ourselves writing emails to people we barely know (if at all) that start with ‘hey there’, ‘hi [name]’ or plain cold ‘hello’ or even ‘greetings’ and end with ‘best’, ‘cheers’, ‘thanks’ or ‘TIA’.
We can do better
If you don’t know the person, no need to ask “how was your weekend”, instead say “hope you had a good weekend”, when ending the message try “wishing you a good week”. These little changes as insignificant as they may appear add a good vibe and can help break ice in communication if it ever progresses beyond email.
Now what about slack? First of all worth pointing out we’re talking about a different use case compared to email, where slack is mostly used for internal communication within teams that usually know each other in person and have regular face to face contact (incl. video). Slack talk like any messenger is assumed to be asynchronous, though in the always on culture can be pretty “live”. When someone you need to contact appears offline, unless it is urgent, better to resort to email, or hold your thought till you see that person back online.
Side note: group chats are different and do not care for individual status of the participants, with exception of public holidays when people are not expected to be working and unless your comment is related to the holiday better save it for another day.
Let’s say person you need for something is online, here comes a dilemma, how do you get your message across in the most efficient way, while also nurturing human connection and at the same time not being overly chatty?
- When you don’t care about the personal connection, go straight ahead to what you need to convey and off you go.
- If you don’t care, but want to sort of show you do, start with a personal question and regardless of reply get to your point and off you go.
- When you care and want a human connection beyond greetings I suggest start with task at hand, be mindful of common culture, in some places it is considered rude to start a conversation without greetings, in others it’s just fine. Once the task talk is done, ask a personal, but not too personal question, either based on your past communication or an ice-breaker. Please do not use current events as ice-breakers, as 2020 is big on events that can easily spiral into depression.
A conversation will ensue as much or as little as it does and you have accomplished a little human connection and can continue nurturing it in future interactions. When you see conversation gets carried away, politely let the other side know that for your mutual benefit you need to get back to your tasks and are looking forward to continue exploring given topic when opportunity presents itself next.
What was the point of all this?
As social beings who starve without face-to-face interactions and are not satisfied by available substitutes we can still create meaningful connections with tools at hand. These little connections are the things that make us different from animals and machines that go from task to task with no self reflection. Preserve your humanity and be kind, it can go a long way.
