Features

Tele-Miscommunications. Say what?

31 Dec 2010

High flyers don’t leave home without their BlackBerrys, iPhones or smartphones these days – you see them punching away at the airport, on the train and in the cab. With us relying on emails and text messages more and more, incidents of miscommunication become increasingly common. While e-communication provides instantaneous connection, it lacks crucial verbal and non-verbal cues, which makes it easy for communicators to fall victim to misunderstanding.

Tele-Miscommunications

A seemingly harmless email may be interpreted differently or even come across as offensive to a recipient.

“The same statement, depending on tone, emphasis, and expression, can be either sarcastic or serious, disrespectful or deferential, sanguine or sombre,” explains Justin Kruger, professor of marketing at New York University Stern School of Business and researcher on email miscommunication.

“(While) speech conveys not only what is said but also how it is said, e-mail is limited to the former. As such, e-mail is an inherently more impoverished communication medium than voice or face-to-face communication.”

It may not seem like much but subtle nuances in verbal cues, such as inflection and tone, as well as non-verbal cues, such as body language and facial expressions, can totally change the meaning of a message.

June Seah, director of marketing and communication of Waldorf Astoria Shanghai on the Bund, probably wishes she had thought of that before a recent incident at work.

After a persistent string of emails from a colleague asking for an update on a partnership agreement with a spa, and unable to get a response from the latter, a frustrated Seah wrote back, tongue-in-cheek: “I don’t own the XXX Spa”.

“She was offended, thinking I was being sarcastic. I was honestly, just trying to be funny. If I had used an emoticon or ‘sound words’ like ‘hehehe’, it might have saved us both the grief,” she said.

Kruger recounted a similar incident where a friend of his sent an email to her colleagues announcing a dinner reception for a job candidate. After promising free food, good drink and stimulating conversation, she jokingly added that “talking to the candidate is not required; just don’t embarrass us”. Much to her surprise, some of her colleagues took offence at the comment, thinking that she was genuinely concerned about the embarrassment that her boorish co-workers might cause.

If the above has happened to you as well, imagine multiplying that with this number: research firm Radicati Group reports that an estimated 247 million emails were sent daily in 2009. That’s 2.8 million emails every second.

And because the keypads on smartphones are such a pain to type with, people use shortened phrases, abbreviations and even made-up words. We don’t have time to slowly spell things out. We battle an avalanche of emails at work, firing off replies on the fly and trying to plough through them as quickly as possible.

“In achieving that speed, users have also started to take short-cuts in the messages that they send. That provides a situation for mistakes to happen, either through grammatical or spelling errors or unrecognisable short-forms and acronyms. (Even) a misplaced or missing punctuation could lead to major miscommunication,” says Daniel Yong, director of global media at Marina Bay Sands

For example, Yong mentions, “an email from a friend with an attachment labelled ‘NSFW’ means you shouldn’t open it on your 16-inch computer screen [at work].”

Unsuspecting recipients unaware that the acronym translates to “Not Safe For Work” might risk having inappropriate or non-work related content displayed on their monitors in the sight line of colleagues and bosses. The Macquarie analyst caught on television looking at an erotic image last February may want to keep this in mind, too.

Acronyms that seem obvious to one may appear meaningless to another. The few seconds saved in typing it out in full could lead to a whole lot of time lost trying to clear up miscommunication later. So it may be better to leave out the IAM and C&P (see chart) unless you are certain the other party knows what you mean.

Likewise, a comma could be the difference between “After eating my dog Toby gets the scraps” and “After eating, my dog Toby gets the scraps”.

While e-miscommunication can be traced to the sender of the message being overconfident in the clarity of the message, overconfidence also happens on the part of receivers.

In a study conducted by Justin Kruger, Nicholas Epley, Jason Parker and Zhi-Wen Ng, 30 pairs of university students were tasked to communicate a list of statements of which half were sarcastic and half were serious.The statements were communicated either via voice-recorded messages or by email.

Those who received voice messages were able to accurately detect sarcasm, or lack thereof, 73 percent of the time. On the other hand, those who received emails were only able to do so 56 percent of the time.

When asked to rate how confident they were that the recipient would be able to accurately identify the sentiments behind the message, participants who sent the messages via email anticipated an accuracy rate of 78 percent. The people who actually received the messages via email guessed that they had correctly interpreted the tone of the message about 90 percent of the time.

As email is inherently more ambiguous than vocal communication, receivers tend to “fill in the blanks” with what they expect is correct. However, there are ways to minimise these “blanks” and avoid confusion and miscommunication.

Firstly, avoid wordiness. When one has to go through possibly hundreds of emails a day, short, succinct sentences carry the point across better than a cluttered email. This, however, does not mean you should randomly cut out words and throw in abbreviations and acronyms. Different acronyms could mean different things in different places, and it would not hurt to spend the extra three seconds to type it out in full. The aftermath of a misunderstanding can end up wasting more of your time.

Secondly, most email programmes have spelling and grammar check. Use it.

Thirdly, although inverted commas, emoticons or words like “haha” can lighten the gravity in a message and help a reader identify if it as sarcastic or serious, adding a “smiley face” to a corporate email is probably not a good idea.

The bottom line is, you are communicating with another person, consider if what you have typed in can be misconstrued before you hit the “send” button.

Finally, when in doubt, it would be best to clarify questions over a telephone call – you are holding one anyway, so dial, don’t type. And of course, if there is a serious matter to discuss, do it face-to-face – it is a form of communication you can never do away with. N

 

Got it?

•            BRB, GTG make a call = Be right back, got to go make a call.

•            AFK, leave a msg n i’ll get bak2u when i return = Away from the keyboard, I’ll get back to you when I return.

•            LOL = Laugh out loud!

•            Gotta run, TTYL = I’ve got to run, talk to you later.

•            C U LTR @ da event? = See you later at the event?

•            IDK wat she’s talkin abt, do u? = I don’t know what she is talking about, do you?

•            I’m busy ATM, can I call u bak? = I am busy at the moment, can I call you back?

•            Cud u C&P it in2 another doc n send it ovr? = Could you cut and paste it into another document and send it over?

•            Lets meet 2moro. BTW, hv u heard fr Angie l8ly? = Let’s meet tomorrow. By the way, have you heard from Angie lately?

•            FYI, heres a fact sheet on our co = For your information, here’s a fact sheet on our company.

•            IAM, wil reply wen bak = In a meeting, will reply when back. 

•            TC = Take care.

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