Are You Optimizing Your Virtual Communication Practices?

18:28Francesca Gino:And that's surface acting. and the teachers in Vietnam, they had to service act all the time because here are private school parents who think their child is an angel and you need to go to them. Well, your little angel is failing class and is horribly disruptive with a smile and say it politely in a more productive way than I just did. And what I found in these studies is that for true authenticity, so you truly feeling what you're going to show, So richer is better, richer communication mode. So that means in person or video. But now what about those cases where you have to surface act? We all have all these nonverbal behaviors that can leak through unintentionally.

19:10Francesca Gino:So it turns out in those cases, in person or video is not as effective because sometimes other people realize, even if you're being inauthentic for their benefit, that can really harm the interaction. So those service actors, they tended to be more likely to choose email. In many cases, it seems better to mask things.

19:31Andrew Brodsky:Well, that's the thing. It feels like chickening out, right?

19:33Francesca Gino:It does. And it turns out that was actually the wrong choice, though. So email was the worst choice. So you see, they chose email over calling you. That's like, wow, they must not really care. So what I found in these studies is there's a sweet spot. Audio interactions, that's telephone or video calls with cameras off, tend to work best for surface acting because audio only masks most of your nonverbal behaviors. All you need to worry about is your word choice and your tone of voice. But it's not seen as inauthentic as email. And this is also part of the reason why cameras off video calls can be good in a whole lot of situations for saving people energy.

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21:32Andrew Brodsky:So talk now about how leaders, beyond sort of encouraging better virtual communication practices and almost building a culture around doing it well, how do they need to model best practices? If you are a manager of a large remote team or you are a C-suite executive overseeing people across the country or around the world, how do you do better at virtual communication?

21:57Francesca Gino:What many leaders don't realize is that people take their communication cues from this leader. If you're sending emails at 2 a.m. on a Saturday, your subordinates think they're going to have to respond to those emails. And as a leader, many times they're saying, oh, this person just really motivated, as opposed to realizing, oh, they're only doing that because they think they have to because I sent that. There's a really interesting set of studies on the topic called the email urgency bias that shows that as recipients of an email, for instance, we tend to think that the person who sent it wants a response much more quickly than they do.

22:37Francesca Gino:But what these studies found is that when you are explicit about your response expectations, so if you say, it'd be great if you get back to me in three days or whatever it is, it reduces the stress for the recipient. So adding in that little extra information as a leader and saying, hey, could you respond by X date removes that unnecessary urgency. It'll improve your subordinate stress. And also they won't feel the need to be as attached to their inboxes where they're constantly checking for emails from their CEO or their director. Because by not having to be attached to that, they can focus more on uninterrupted periods of their work.

23:16Francesca Gino:So setting those response expectations, being explicit about them is beneficial in reducing stress, increasing focus. And the other nice added benefit of saying, you know, as a team, we'll respond to emails within 24 hours, as an example. Let's say Slack instant messages or Teams messages within two hours. That way, if we're in a meeting or you're focused, you don't have to interrupt it. But if there's an emergency, will do, let's say, text message or a phone call. There's a few nice things about that. Beyond just decreasing stress during the workday, it improves stress outside the workday because you know that you're just listening for that text chime for something urgent.

23:58Francesca Gino:You don't have to check your work inbox at all on the weekend or on your vacations. If it's urgent, they'll get you the way that was already discussed.

24:06Andrew Brodsky:I like the idea of establishing norms and then showing that you're also practicing those norms as the leader. What advice do you give to executives if they're presenting to the board virtually or they're leading an all staff? You know, we all know the feeling of being an employee that's talked at for 40 minutes and it doesn't feel very interactive or human or useful. So how can people better command those types of rooms?

24:35Francesca Gino:So I have two pieces of advice. The first is generally regarding the structure of the meeting. And this is something I implement in my teaching. I often teach virtually to make sure my students stay engaged. If you are just talking for an hour, you're gonna lose people, especially when it's virtual and there's so many potential other distractions they could do. So you wanna try and mix it up in terms of structure. Maybe you've got a video from something related to the organization that you could play in there. Maybe you have some breakouts. That's really useful. If you're thinking about who's in the meeting too, it tends to be smaller and shorter meetings have been shown to be much more engaging than longer, huge group ones.

25:16Francesca Gino:But let's just say you do need this longer, big group one. Research shows that one of the benefits actually of virtual meetings is this chat function. And enabling the chat function and making it clear what people can put in there. So it'd be great if people could kind of add side comments or feedback because we all can't talk during this meeting because there's so many of us here. That way we can hear from everybody. That's been shown to increase engagement in a meeting, the degree to which people who don't normally talk add to the meeting. So, well, there's chat, there's emojis, there's polls, all these other things we can do that can include more people in the conversation.

25:58Andrew Brodsky:You mentioned that you do teach mostly remotely, and I know that that's due to an autoimmune condition. I assume that that means you also do research, collaborate on other work projects remotely with colleagues. What have you learned from your own experience having to communicate mainly virtually? Has it been trial and error? Has everything that you've experienced in your personal life lined up with the research that you've done?

26:24Francesca Gino:This gets to the question of also why do I study virtual communication? And as some history, when I was 16, I was diagnosed with a severe case of leukemia. And as a 16-year-old, hearing that is like pretty crazy. I can imagine. Yeah. But at the time, humans have weird coping mechanisms. So for me, I just kind of detached a little bit. I was curious, like, what is it like for this doctor to have to tell a 16-year-old that they have cancer? And I had a lot of hard conversations with doctors throughout that year and a half. I did chemo, radiation, bone marrow transplant. And to me, this is just interesting, the constant need to communicate difficult things.

27:02Francesca Gino:And so this is what initially struck this interest with me. But during my treatment for my bone marrow transplant, I was in one of these like bubble rooms for a month and a half where I was communicating with people from a distance. And then following my treatment, which completely great healed, everything's good. I never regained the ability to produce antibodies of immune deficiency. And in the post-COVID world, that's meant that I've had to stay remote a lot more than other people. People, you know, when they say, oh, it's not too bad unless you have immune deficiency. Unfortunately, I'm the kind of person who that applies to.

27:34Francesca Gino:Right. And I'm one of the only professors at my university who's still teaching remotely.

27:39Andrew Brodsky:And yet you're really highly rated by your students, I understand.

27:43Francesca Gino:Yeah, yeah. It's been a lot of trial and error and the experimentation is really useful.

27:49Andrew Brodsky:And when you're working with organizations, what is your biggest pet peeve with the way that they're operating?

27:55Francesca Gino:The biggest pet peeve I see is just this mindless approach to the way we interact with one another. we all go about it in our day-to-day. We're more focused on what we're saying as opposed to over what mode we're saying it or how the other person might interpret it. With virtual communication, one of the big backfirings I see in organizations is just a pure lack of perspective taking.

28:17Andrew Brodsky:And that's the P in your framework ping. P for perspective taking, I for initiative, N for nonverbal, and G for goals.

28:25Francesca Gino:Exactly. So when we're in person, The other person staring is in a foot in front of us. When we're at home at our computers, we're staring at our screen or at best, maybe a small square of the other person. It's just not the same. We feel comfortable doing things or saying things we might not in person. And even if we're not doing that, we're just we're not cuing into the other person, how they might interpret this as well. An activity I love to do with my MBAs to kind of illustrate this is I invite two volunteers. and this is based on a study from Stanford. I have one of them tap out a song like on their desk and then I ask them, how confident are you that the other person will guess this song?

29:08Francesca Gino:And most people are very confident. You know, you tap a song, you're like, oh yeah, they'll guess it's like 60, 70, 80%. But in reality, it's very rare for the other person to guess this.

29:17Andrew Brodsky:This is a game I play with my family, either whistling or humming, and we are very bad at it.

29:23Francesca Gino:Yeah. And the issue that happens is when you're tapping, you hear the music in your head, but the other person doesn't hear this music. And there was a study on emotion email that drew on this. They showed that people, they asked them to communicate emotion, sarcasm, seriousness, whatever it is. And they said, how confident are you that the other person will guess that you are sarcastic or angry or happy? And people think high percentage. But in reality, a very low percentage of people got it. And the thing when it comes to virtual communication is that while we're typing out that email or text message, we hear our emotion in our heads.

30:04Francesca Gino:But on the other side, the person is coming from a different set of assumptions, a different set of information. So they hear different emotion, which is what causes us to be so overconfident and things to backfire so spectacularly.

30:16Andrew Brodsky:See, this is why I use exclamation points and the occasional, I hate to admit it, smiley face. Yeah. Because I want people to know that I'm being warm and friendly in my email.

30:27Francesca Gino:Yeah. And there's good research to back that up. The emoji is messier. So twofold recommendations from this research. One, you do want to err on the side of being more positive because virtual communication often comes off more negative because in part, we have our own anxieties about things. Emoticons, messy. Some research shows that it's good. Some shows that it's bad. My recommendation is that you want to engage in something called language mimicry, which is where you take your cues from the other person. So if the other person uses emojis, use them too. If they use exclamation marks, use them too.

31:05Francesca Gino:If they use certain jargon, use them too. The reason for this is that we all tend to trust people are similar to us. And also we all think we're great communicators. So if someone communicates like us, we're like, oh, they're a great communicator too. So taking that approach of mimicking is really good. The only exception is if you're a super high powered leader, do not mimic someone low in power because that will backfire and be seen as condescending. But generally, if it's lateral or you're doing it upwards, this is a good strategy.

31:35Andrew Brodsky:So I also read research that your sign off can be really powerful. And I think as a result, I started signing off most of my emails, thanks or many thanks, instead of something more formal like best. And so I think that gets back to what you were saying about mindfulness. It's like even these tiny small things, like whether you use an exclamation point or start with dear or sign off with thanks, or if in a meeting you start with a bit of chit chat or you turn your camera on or off, just the idea that we have to be cognizant about everything that we're doing. in all of these communication channels to make sure that we're sort of conveying how we actually feel and think, right?

32:16Francesca Gino:The issue you're highlighting is this idea that there's a gap of information that often happens virtually. If we're in person, we see all their number of behavior, we hear their tone of voice over email, we miss all that. But even on video, if in person in a meeting, I was taking notes during a meeting, I would seem super engaged. But in a video call, if I'm taking notes, I'm looking down at my notebook. And what does it look like I'm doing right now if I was in video call?

32:45Andrew Brodsky:Right.

32:45Francesca Gino:I'm on my cell phone. Yeah, exactly. I'm on my smartphone.

32:48Andrew Brodsky:Right.

32:49Francesca Gino:Because they don't see the notepad. They don't see the pen. So the thing is, all this stuff is missing virtually. You noted a lot of strategies to make sure that you come off good potentially on the situation, being overly positive in all this. But there's another approach that's more overarching that I tend to often recommend, which is making the implicit more explicit. Just saying if you're taking notes, oh, hey, I'm taking notes here. It feels a little bit weird to be more explicit with what we're doing and explaining what we're doing. But the issue comes when there is that missing information.

33:28Francesca Gino:People are going to be searching for reasons or other cues. You fill in those gaps so people aren't left having to rely on all those ancillary cues.

33:37Andrew Brodsky:So we can't have any podcast at HBR in the current era without asking about how AI and particularly generative AI is affecting virtual communication. What's your advice about how to use it well?

33:51Francesca Gino:This is a big question I've been getting lately about should I use AI to write my emails or instant messages, Slack messages? There's even the crazy examples of people having AI avatars going to video meetings for them. My general advice, based on the research, is that for the interactions that matter, you want to make sure that they're your own words. Most times, people are not going to realize that you used AI to communicate with them. But the issue comes is maybe one out of every hundred times they might. Maybe it uses words you don't use, like prolific or whatever else. Or maybe you spoke about something in person.

34:33Francesca Gino:So you were past the water cooler. The person you were emailing said, oh, yeah, my family, we had a stomach bug this weekend. It was a mess. Finally, we're feeling better. And then a few hours later, you send them an AI written email that starts with, I hope you had a great weekend, exclamation mark. completely missing the fact that you talked about that in person. And the problem is when a person realizes you used AI to communicate with them once, they're going to question every past virtual interaction. And if they're questioning, did they communicate with AI previously? The next question they're going to ask, which is one you don't want them to ask is, why am I even communicating with this person if all I'm getting is correspondence from AI?

35:18Andrew Brodsky:And I'm sure the same is true for organizations interacting with customers, right?

35:22Francesca Gino:Exactly. If you think about this, there's like a bunch of what I call often dumb human authenticity things. So hand cracked sea salt or hand cut French fries. Does the fact that the salt was cracked by someone using themselves a pepper grinder or salt grinder as opposed to machine or the fact that the fries were cut by somebody as opposed to machine actually alter the taste of them? No, they don't. But it sounds better. We like this human component of things. It seems more personal, like we care. So for organizations, when they have humans communicating with you, it seems like the organization cares more as opposed to we just have some algorithm communicating with you.

36:05Francesca Gino:That's not to say that we shouldn't use AI, but many people are undervaluating the importance of a human connection. Because again, this gets back to this point about we're very self-focused when we're virtual because the other person's not sitting in front of us. You could imagine if someone was sitting in front of us and we asked an AI prompt to respond to them and held up our phone to that person in person or had the AI read the message off the phone. That would be very offensive to do in person, but it doesn't feel weird virtually. So it's that lack of perspective taking that often people defer to AI more than they potentially should when it comes to their virtual communication.

36:42Andrew Brodsky:Well, Andrew, thank you so much for turning your personal experience into a body of research and a book and this conversation where you're helping all of us become better virtual communicators.

36:53Francesca Gino:Thanks. It was a great conversation to have virtually.

36:58Andrew Brodsky:That's University of Texas professor Andrew Brodsky, author of the book Ping, The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication, and CEO of the Ping Group. If you found this episode helpful, share it with a colleague and be sure to subscribe and rate IdeaCast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you want to help leaders move the world forward, please consider subscribing to Harvard Business Review. You'll get access to the HBR mobile app, the weekly exclusive insider newsletter, and unlimited access to HBR online. Just head to hbr.org slash subscribe. Thanks to our team, Senior Producer Mary Du, Audio Product Manager Ian Fox, and Senior Production Specialist Rob Eckhart.

37:38Andrew Brodsky:And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We'll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I'm Alison Beard.

37:51Thank you.