Episode 181: Digital Body Language
/“Even the fact that we are all on smaller thumbnail screens in a video meeting, we are less cognizant of a lot of those visual body language biases. If there’s four men and one woman, we’re less likely to notice that.”
“I even went back through the email to see…was I more direct than I should have been, or was I unkind in the way that I was communicating? I really think it was because I just didn’t use exclamation points to seem friendlier.”
Erica Dhawan (l) and Ashley M-T (r) engaging in our own digital body language
Nearly all our workplace communication is digital. Gone are the days when faxing seemed like efficient new technology (believe me, it did at one point). Emails, team communication programs like Slack, texting, instant messaging - they’re all convenient and speedy. They can also cause a lot of angst.
In this show I sit down with Erica Dhawan, author of the book Digital Body Language, to talk about why digital communication can be so fraught with frustration and anxiety. Is that terse email simply to the point, or does a more sinister meaning lurk in those short sentences? Are emojis OK at the office and if so, for whom? I’m also joined by Liz Zelnick, whose experience in a past job made her think again about her use of exclamation points.
And we look at the advantages of virtual meetings, where stereotypes can fade into the background.
You can also read a transcript of the show.