Episode 181: Digital Body Language
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time...our workplace communication has moved almost entirely online. But it is easy to be misinterpreted when you shoot off a text, Slack message, or email...and women are often judged on the friendliness factor.
“There was a more junior man who was on my team whose work I managed and he had a few drinks and told people that I was a bitch over email.”
Still, some aspects of digital life may weaken old prejudices...
“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.”
Digital body language - coming up on The Broad Experience.
I’m what my first guest today,calls a digital adapter - someone who started my adult life in the analog world with land lines and fax machines...I remember in my very first job another assistant explaining to me how to change the paper in the fax machine - she told me it was a lot like changing the loo roll in the bathroom.
Technology has moved on a LOT since then.
And digital communication is incredibly convenient. But it can also be confusing, frustrating, and anxiety provoking.
Erica Dhawan is the author of the book Digital Body Language. She began noticing people’s actual body language when she was a little girl...she grew up outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, caught between two cultures.
“As a very shy and introverted girl, my parents were Indian immigrants, and at home we spoke Punjabi and Hindi, which meant when I got to American schools I had accented English. I really struggled to find my voice, and in every report card from kindergarten through twelfth grade as ‘the good Indian student’ I often got straight As, but every teacher had the same feedback: I wish Erica spoke up more in class.”
She may not have been speaking but she was listening and observing American culture as it played out in the hallways of her school. It fascinated her - the way the popular girls walked with their heads held high and shoulders back, the way other kids slouched and looked away from the teachers during school assemblies, to show their disinterest.
She became an expert on non-verbal cues and began mimicking some of this behavior herself to fit in.
20 years ago, while she was in high school, something happened that cemented her interest in body language, and what it can do.
“After 9/11 in the US anyone who looked of South Asian descent was often seen with suspicion. It was a very sensitive time…it was a very sensitive time in the US and around the world.”
One day Erica was at tennis practice at the local YMCA, and her dad came to pick her up.
“Someone at the front desk saw him, a tall Indian man with a mustache…a cardiologist at a local hospital in that town, and deemed him suspicious and called the cops on him. And I’ll never forget walking out of that practice and seeing my father being interrogated by the police. I watched him with his palms open, his head down, respecting and showing deference to the officer, his soft empathetic voice signaling that he was simply a community member and worked as a doctor at a nearby hospital. And I saw so critically how my father used the power of body language to bridge connection and trust at a time when there was a lot of distrust. I remember driving home with my father and sharing how in many ways I was so upset at the level of racial profiling and ignorance that I saw. But he said something I’ll never forget, he said, wouldn’t it be helpful to step in the shoes of how others are feeling right now? And it taught me so much about how empathy is really bridged through our body language, and it’s one of the most powerful sources of connection.”
But that’s traditional body language...expressions, hand gestures, posture...it wasn’t until more recent years that her work with corporations got her thinking about what she calls digital body language - the signals we send in our digital messages.
Lots of clients were complaining to her about the same thing: miscommunication in the workplace. Something I think about often.
AM-T: I want to talk about written communication first because that can really be quite fraught, can’t it - why is that? Why do so many of us get tripped up by email and other types of messaging. What’s going on?
“Well 60 to 80 percent of communication is our non-verbal body language, the pacing, the pausing, the gestures, the tone or the direct eye contact or smile, signaling a level of trust and intimacy. But when we move to email, text messages, different chat groups, much of that body language hasn’t disappeared, it’s just transformed. We now send digital body language signals and cues in our written communication whether we know it or not, and in many ways what I learned in my research is many of us are doing it blindly, accidentally or just plain wrong.”
She says there are two sides to this - the sender and the recipient. The sender might dash off an email and not think much about their phrasing, or use of punctuation...but she says those things are the equivalent to our tone of voice in person or an expression on our face. An email the sender sees as to-the-point, full of short sentences marked by full stops, might provoke anxiety in the recipient.
She says when we read online, it is not the same as reading from a piece of paper. Our brains process the information differently. And that can lead to misunderstandings...
“We’re much more likely to rush through it, to comprehend less, to maybe ruminate around one specific line or phrase…’send me this now’ could feel passive-aggressive or ‘call me today’ could feel alarming, where ‘call me today’ could be excited to connect…the key when it comes to written communication is to understand we must take the time to read those messages much more carefully, and to be thoughtful, to not rush off messages back that may not actually answer those questions…
That can be a big problem with email. Recently I got into one of those email strings trying to understand a particular point. I thought my initial question was clear but I got a half answer in response, so I sent another email trying to clarify, and on the string went...
“There are cases, we’ve all seen those back and forth reply all emails where we really should just pick up the phone and have a more complex, nuanced discussion. I like to say picking up the phone is worth a thousand emails.”
AM-T: “I’m glad you brought up the phone because what I did in that case was, I thought, this is ridiculous, this is gonna get even more complicated if we continue to go back and forth, so I did in fact literally pick up the phone and call my colleague.”
“What’s that? Do we even remember the phone?”
AM-T: “Exactly...and she’s got to be at least 10 years younger than me. I come from a time when you actually used to just pick up the phone and call people and it wasn't scary for people to answer. She didn’t answer, and then I thought oh, I’ve committed a terrible faux pas, I haven’t messaged her to say hey, can we talk? So I didn’t leave a message because I knew that would not work. But she saw the missed call and called me back quickly and we were very easily able to get to the bottom of our questions. But for many, many people the phone, it’s not the same as people like me who are digital adapters who came from an era where you had to use the phone.”
“One thing that’s more important than ever is to reflect ourselves on what is our own natural digital style, and how can we best connect with others? For instance if you’re a sales person, I know one salesperson who got some advice from a more seasoned salesperson who was very much a digital adapter who said, if you want to sell to people you have to pester them on the phone. And this salesperson was actually selling to a lot of younger digital natives. She made a bunch of phone calls and they fell flat. No one picked up the phone. Then she trusted her own instincts and she wrote a funny crafted email saying I left you a voicemail, but who listens to voicemail any more, I’d love to talk to you about my new service, here’s a Calendly availability link about when we can speak.
And she found that model, the one that had the least human interaction, got her ten times the sales calls than pestering people with phone calls out of the blue...and so actually understanding these differences is not only key in learning about ourselves, but can make or break relationships now across a variety of team dynamics in a digital world.”
Which totally makes sense, right? It’s about finding out what the other person or people are most receptive to, because when they’re receptive you’ll have a better chance of getting your message across.
But sometimes communication goes awry, despite our best efforts. Earlier in her career Erica was introduced to the CFO of a Fortune 50 company and she had had breakfast with her, and the woman offered to introduce Erica to someone who might be a potential client. Erica thanked her, and they parted. But ten days later, she hadn’t heard anything.
“So I said to myself, ‘What should I do here? I should follow up, I should be pro-active. And you know this leader must be very busy, so I should couch my email with an acknowledgement that she’s really busy, and how thankful I am for this introduction she proposed.’
I send an email follow-up ten days later saying hi X, I know you’re really busy, I just wanted to check on the introduction to John, thank you so much for your help. Within about 3 minutes I get a response back from her saying, ‘I would recommend that you not start an email to someone saying I know you’re really busy.’ And that was really the end of the conversation.”
Ouch. And yet I’m not sure I would have done anything different if I’d been in Erica’s shoes. She was trying not to be pushy, to acknowledge that this CFO had a lot on her plate. But the whole interaction fell apart.
“And in many ways we’ve all been in those situations where an email fizzles or falls flat and doesn’t show our good intentions. The first key thing is, in all our relationships both in person and in digital messages we are answering two other questions that guide the signals we send: first is, who has more or less power here? Second is, how much do we trust eachother? Let’s be honest, in this situation there was a high power and trust gap. So a lot of the cues I was sending in my email were left to more misinterpretation than in maybe a case where I knew someone very well. Second thing is, maybe this CFO was having a bad day, maybe she was struggling to catch up on her email…she didn’t assume that good intent that I had in the email. But third, I used that ‘I know you’re really busy’ just to cover my own insecurity in following up, so I also could have just been more direct and to the point and not couch or assume something of her as well.”
In a minute...we know women are expected to smile a lot...and the exclamation mark is the digital equivalent of a smile.
Today, Liz Zelnick is deputy director of policy and legislative affairs for the Massachusetts state treasurer.
She’s 34 now, but when she was in her late twenties she was working for a nonprofit she says was a bit like a startup in feel. Lots of young people, lots of making things up as you go along. She oversaw a team of people - it was her job to ensure a smooth workflow.
And until then Liz had always been pretty brisk and businesslike in her communication.
“I came from the camp of being very direct over email, both email and text message for work, rarely using exclamation points or smiley faces to get my point across. I just saw them as superfluous.”
One day she sent out some reminders to her team the way she often did.
“I sent some emails about following up on a deadline to send out their portion of the work to be approved by a certain time, signed off, and didn't think twice about it.”
The whole office had happy hour most Fridays. That particular week Liz didn’t go. But afterwards, a few of her friends got in touch - someone had been gossiping about her.
“There was a more junior man who was on my team, you know, whose work I managed and he had a few drinks and told people that I was a bitch over email.”
All because of that email where she’d asked people to get their work in by the deadline. Something she’d done in what she thought was a polite, straightforward way.
“And it was interesting ‘cause I had never been categorized as someone who was, quote unquote that word in the workplace, or, you know, even unfriendly. I had always had positive feedback about how I communicated and how I worked with my colleagues. So it was a little bit shocking and it sort of took me aback. And I even went back through the email and I went to see, was I more direct than I should have been, or was I unkind in the way that I was communicating... and ultimately it came down to, I really think that it was because I just didn't use exclamation points to seem friendlier, or because maybe the lack of exclamation points coming from a woman was seen as mean or cold or unfriendly.”
AM-T: “Which brings me to what you told me offline, which is in your friend group, your girlfriend group, exclamation points are expected, right?”
“Yeah, absolutely. You know, the joke in my friend group is, ‘don't worry, Liz doesn't hate you. She just doesn't like exclamation points.’ And you know, we have a group thread and I was known for not using them because you use them when they’re meant to be used, otherwise what's the impact, right? How am I supposed to show something is exciting? And I think more women use them in the workplace now, I think to come across as less dominant or aggressive in the way that we communicate.”
Hearing this made me begin to second-guess my own direct email style, almost entirely devoid of exclamation points, especially how it comes across to colleagues on a new project, people I don’t know very well. I can’t help wondering whether a recent communication hole was because the senior guy I was dealing with had the same feelings about me that Liz’s former coworker did about her.
So I asked Liz, did that incident of several years ago change the way she did things - did she start deploying exclamation marks?
“I did, yeah. I started using exclamation points more. Which, you know, is...I still think about how many I use in a professional email. I don't want to use too many because I don't want to seem unprofessional. But I don't want to use too few because I don't want to come across as cold. Um, I don't really ever hear men talking about this or examining this, in my experience...maybe they do. But it's interesting. I really have started to use them more, and I haven't had a complaint since.”
Erica says there’s much room for improvement when it comes to how we judge people for their digital style. She says someone like Liz or I should be able to be as direct as we like without being thought of as cold...but double standards do exist.
“One study showed if a younger female used multiple emojis in workplace compared to a man of any rank level in that same workplace, the woman was more likely to be seen as incompetent, and the man was more likely to be seen as casual or friendly.”
And to reveal some of my own gender biases here, I’m not used to seeing emojis in business email, but just recently a guy I work with used an emoji, a smiley face, in one of his emails. His job is to sort of bring people together, and I registered that emoji as ‘friendly,’ a way of keeping things light and cooperative and positive in this string with multiple people. But honestly, if a woman had sent that same email with that same smiley face...I think I might have been annoyed and thought, why is she doing that?
Erica says there’s a fine line between using too many emojis and exclamation points and not enough. Obviously if you work in a young office where everyone uses them, that’s just the style and that’s great. But if you’re working in a more inter-generational setting it’s a question of adapting your style to suit the other people. She says this is especially valuable during Covid times...
“I’d actually argue that especially in the last 18 months for leaders and executives, these tools can be used to build that emotional intimacy with those that are digital natives in way that the face to face gatherings used to do but digital connection must replace in our new settings.”
Talking of new settings, I’ve read a few accounts during Covid of women who say they much prefer digital meetings to in-person ones because they feel less intimidated in the virtual setting. Erica says this tends to be true of introverts no matter their gender - they feel more able to speak up or even get their point across in the chat rather than orally...
“Even the fact that we’re all on smaller thumbnail screens in a video meeting – we’re less cognizant of those visual body language biases. If there’s four men and one woman we’re less likely to notice that in these smaller screens. If there’s three tall men and one shorter woman of color, again it’s just an example where we're not as visually detecting a lot of our differences instantly. I’d even argue that as someone on the edge of being an older millennial/Gen Xer I’ve been seen as more ageless on a video screen then where I often show up face to face, where I’m dealing with much older senior executives. The first time I come into a room I may look like their daughter, and now in a digital setting I think a lot of those traditional ageism biases can be not not erased, but reduced.”
I told Erica about a question one of you had about how to make virtual meetings engaging. How to be a good host. Especially when people are so screen-weary. She says apart from the obvious - having an agenda, calling on people to speak, trying to end early - remember these meetings are a bit like theater, especially if you’re the one who’s on. If you are, rather than looking at your fellow attendees on the screen...
“If you are presenting to someone, especially where there is low trust initially, look into the camera, try to look into the camera 40 to 60 percent of the time, make sure you’re far enough away that people can see your facial expressions but also some of your hand gestures...and if you haven’t invested in a simple webcam and ring light, again, less than $50, do it now - it actually makes a really big difference.”
I have that light on order. Finally.
Before Erica and I ended our conversation I wanted to go back to digital messaging, the source of so much workplace angst. She says it’s worth bearing a few things in mind when a message goes unanswered for days or an email seems passive-aggressive...or just aggressive...
“Assume the best intent and don’t get emotionally hijacked if you feel you are reading into something someone said. If you see a consistent pattern, then check in to make sure your interpretations are correct. And know when to pick up the phone to have that dialogue rather than resorting to another written message.”
Erica Dhawan is the author of Digital Body Language - How to Build Trust and Connection No Matter the Distance. Thanks to her and Liz Zelnick for being my guests on this show.
I always enjoy hearing from you, digitally - if you have your own stories to tell about digital body language leave a comment under this episode at TheBroad Experience dot com, join the discussion on the Facebook page or on Twitter and of course you can always email me via the website as well.
This podcast is a one-woman production. If you can support the show with a donation even if it’s a small one, that’s fine, please hit the support tab at TheBroad Experience dot com. This show is almost ten years old and I could not have done it without you.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. See you next time.