Communication principles for a remote world
When the COVID crisis began in February, a fully distributed workforce was unthinkable to most business managers. Water cooler conversations, team lunches and other critical parts of the daily cadence have been completely disrupted. Yet with all of this turmoil, many organizations have survived, and some have even become more productive. We know most organizations are in the process of redefining the working cadence in a post-COVID world. And, while it is critical to take a long-term view when making these decisions, we have found that a deliberate focus on improving communication to be low hanging fruit for helping distributed teams and individuals evolve rapidly.
The importance of communication cannot be overstated.
It is an essential building block for building culture, for incentivizing individuals, and for mapping out strategy. Most leaders understand this academically, but effective communication in the real world can be a challenge, this is even more true in the current situation. It doesn’t matter if it is a spouse, child, friend, or co-worker. Communicating effectively is one of the most difficult things we do each day.
In an essay from a few years ago, writer and investor Morgan Housel described what he called “The Universal Laws of the World.” In the piece, Housel writes about many laws and heuristics that drive behavior and outcomes in the world today. He includes common frameworks like Parkinson’s Law and Littlewood’s Law that are useful for all decision makers, but considering there COVID crisis, one law jumped out above others, they are called Wiio’s Laws.
“Communication usually fails, except by accident.”
Osmo Wiio, was a Finnish economist, journalist, and member of parliament. In Wiio’s world, whether negotiating laws and regulations or writing stories, being a strong communicator was critical to success. Over his life, he came up with dozens of rules to improve communication. Housel highlights a few of them:
“If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.”
“The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.”
“In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be.”
The key point? Assume communication will not be received in the way it’s intended.
This is especially true in the age of COVID.
Zoom, Text, Slack, emoji’s, tweets… the everyday flow of communication is endless, and the volume of what we encode and decode everyday makes misinterpretation occur more often than many of us would like. Traditional communication skills like picking up on non-verbal and body language, that have helped improve communication in the past, have become nearly irrelevant.
This is not a critique of the modern communication environment.
Many of these tools have made us more productive and without them the consequences of COVID would most likely be worse. But the shift in daily communication channels highlights another key point: everybody communicates in a different way. Remembering that people give and received information in different ways is a key point of Wiio’s Laws. If you assume the message will fail before it is sent, it will make you think more critically about your methods. It will make you simplify, add context, and tailor it based on the specific situation.
It is a checklist of sorts.
Before a 1 on 1 discussion, writing a memo, or sending out text, considering first the ways your message might be misinterpreted will make it more likely to be interpreted successfully. For most of us, it is easy to let our internal voice drive the message, but intent is not magically transferred to recipients. Now more than ever, pausing to consider the ways a message could be received, and the format which it would be best delivered, are critical for helping teams communicate better and become more productive.
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