"Ping-sanity" and Too Many Work Chats

//Disclaimer: All opinions are my own//

April is recognised as stress awareness month, and one area of work life that can cause a lot of stress is communication. I was inspired to look into this topic by the guide to internal communication from the company 37signals , recently highlighted in the Recruiting Brainfood newsletter. The long list of recommendations can look quite radical, but every other bullet point made me nod in agreement. To be very clear, the guide mostly focuses on the digital communication in the remote-first work environment. Yet the recommendations can be applied to the hybrid workplaces as well because many of us still collaborate more online than on the office spaces. I want to focus on it for a simple reason: we all have (mostly) figured out real-life communication rules and codes; but digital communication at work, with its many channels and forms, can baffle and overwhelm. At first, I thought that stress caused by how we deal with information at work is a purely post-pandemic problem. Then I came across a 2019 article that states that 70% of the US employees feel overwhelmed by dysfunctional communication at work . It sites a study that showed a drop in leadership confidence and even financial repercussions of unclear or ineffective internal communication. The article focuses on differences between age and gender groups as a possible cause for issues, and sadly breezes over the importance of clarity. But a lot of industry leaders have been focusing on it over and over: “clarity is compassion” – from Kim Scott to Brené Brown to Graham Weaver – all stress how important it is to say exactly what you mean without sugarcoating or trying to make things look better than they are. That’s what Kim Scott calls ruinous empathy – and, while it feels easier in the moment (if you are conflict-averse), it leaves problems unsolved and likely to escalate.

There is another end of this spectrum: when our counterpart in the conversation is the screen rather than a real person, it may be hard to connect emotionally to them. Not seeing the person makes it harder to feel empathy, and we may end up shooting laconic answers with little regard to how they make the other person feel. It’s very easy to treat a workplace chat as a place to vent one’s frustration rather than show support and encouragement. At the same time, we cannot appreciate how our messages can add to the overall workload or level of distraction our colleague may be already experiencing. We may write to them expecting a near-immediate answer, because don't know what their current workload is. The absence of physical clues like eye contact and intonations can make the communication feel robotic and void of compassion. Choosing the right language, right tone of message can be difficult, especially for those who use a foreign language to communicate at work, or people with dyslexia, dysgraphia or neurological disorders related to a brain injury. Luckily, ?GenAI has been a handy tool recently, though it still lacks the sense for genuine emotion.

Another everyday cause of stress is, surprisingly, the abundance of information we all receive. Even before the lockdown and remote work for most of us, researchers were decrying the so-called “hyperactive hive mind ” – the brain that reacts to instant messages and notifications by jumping from one task to another. Interestingly, 37signals also looked at the pros and cons of instant messaging as a productivity tool. Their conclusion: chats are distracting, create the culture of unjustified urgency, they are repetitive and unstructured. They also make it hard to retrieve important information later when you need it. Unarguably, work chats can be great to exchange greetings, memes, and cat pictures. But they are probably not the best place for important announcements, and not sustainable as a knowledge sharing platform. The only thing that is worse than this “ping-sanity”, as ?is forced multitasking: we all had meetings that would take a less engaging turn, and we’ll automatically open our inbox or respond to the workplace chat messages. In the pre-pandemic times, some companies introduced the closed laptop / no laptop rule in the meetings. Of course, it’s not possible if your employees are working remotely. A possible solution could be having shorter meetings with a clearly set agenda . Is there a way to reduce stress caused by workplace communication? I’ve put together some ideas I would implement, but this list is nowhere complete!

1. Setting up Basic Rules

What channels should be used for which updates? How will you share information depending on its urgency? What tools will you use for focused, deep-thinking work? How will you capture agreements and policies, and how will you ensure everyone knows of their existence and reviews them when necessary?

2. Your Knowledge Base

What is the platform you use to store all documents, policies, and references? Minimize the number of platforms your employees need to search for information. Dedicate resources to update your knowledge base regularly and consistently. Remove fricitons and make the access to your knowledge base easy for all employees.

3. Avoid ASAP tasks

Few tasks are truly urgent; they become urgent with poor planning or communication . Whenever possible, relate asks as soon as you get them, not a day before the deadline. If every request is ASAP, you devalue tasks that are less urgent but equally important.

4. Out of Office means Out of Office

This one is all about boundaries. What is the communication path and responsibilities for holiday covers or sick leaves. What queries are considered urgent and which ones can wait till the main point of contact is back?

5. Separate Work and Private

We may make friends at work. But we don’t want all our colleagues to have unlimited access to our Instagram or twitter / X or TikTok. You don’t want to end up arguing about politics, human rights, immigration or religion. This may affect your work relations, and cause unnecessary frustration.

6. Meeting Preparation

This is a textbook rule, but always worth repeating: if you want to have productive meetings, set up clear goals and expectations. Share the agenda with attendees, as well as any prep work they need to do in advance, any questions they need to think about.

The hard part about the workplace communication is that we all process information differently, and some tools or level or urgency may be normal for one person, but may create immense stress in the other. Communicating with clarity and empathy, setting up some ground rules and avoiding unnecessary urgency can be a good place to start if we want to make our team work more enjoyable.

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