211. Small Screens, Strong Signals: Mastering Modern Communication
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If you think about your communication over a week or even a day or even an hour, think of how many different types of virtual communication you use. Texting, slacking, emails, virtual calls. We need to make sure that we are as efficient and as effective as we can be when we are communicating virtually.

I'm Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. ♪

Today, I'm excited to speak with Andrew Brodsky. Andrew is an expert in workplace technology, communication, and productivity. He teaches and conducts research at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, Austin. His latest book is Ping, The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication. Welcome, Andrew. Your work is so relevant and of the moment. I appreciate you being here.

Thanks for having me on the show. I've been a longtime fan of your work, so I'm really excited getting to talk. Thank you for that.

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So shall we get started? Yes, let's go for it. Excellent. So your latest book and work focus on virtual communication. I'm curious, what counts as virtual communication for you? Is it just Zoom, Meet, or Teams, or is it something even more than that? For virtual communication, it's simply defined as anything that involves communicating through some kind of electronic device or computer. So that is, of course, Zoom, Teams, those video calls, WhatsApp.

but it goes all the way down to text messaging, instant messaging, email. And now phone calls are virtual because they all happen via our smartphones or voice over IP. So anything that happens electronically. So basically not face-to-face interactions and not snail mail where you're writing letters and sending them via the post office.

I'm not even sure younger folks know how to do that latter part anymore. When we communicate virtually, we have choices about tools and channels, etc. Do you have advice and guidance for which tools are better for which certain communication goals? So do I use a text to let my boss know I'm going to be late? Do I send an email? What's advice and guidance on these different channels?

I wish I could say that there was just one best mode, although that would make for a very short book. The key general advice here is you want to think about what are the core things you're trying to do here and what mode serves that best.

For instance, if we're considering meetings versus email, are you relaying information? Do you want to have a back and forth? Once you get the basics down, you start to think more into the granularity of what you're trying to achieve interaction and then the dynamics that are going on in each one. For instance, let's talk about brainstorming.

So brainstorming, many people think, is better in person. We can bounce ideas of each other. We got a nice whiteboard in front of us. But generally what research shows is that the earlier stages of brainstorming are better done separately and electronically. And the reason is a few fold. When we're sitting in a group, only one person can talk at a time.

That's productivity loss right there. If you're all trying to generate 20 ideas, it doesn't really work well in a meeting with 10 people because you don't have time to say 20 ideas out loud. But if you're all typing them down separately, that is much more productive. When we have a group of people staring at us, we're afraid often of saying something really nonconforming because they'll judge us. But when we're sitting behind our computer typing, that fear that presence of the other people is less salient.

And lastly, when we hear an idea in person during brainstorming, our mind kind of sticks on that idea. And it's hard to come up with divergent thoughts from that. So basically, research shows that early stages of brainstorming, you get more and more novel ideas when you do it separately and virtually. But then later on, when you're trying to decide an idea or tweak an idea, that's when you want to meet as a group because that's when you have that back and forth. That's when it's good to work off of each other.

So what I'm hearing you say is the biggest determinant of which channel you use is what you're trying to accomplish. If you're expecting some back and forth or you really rely on somebody else's response, maybe the more interactive approaches are

are better. But if you're really trying to do things like ideate and brainstorm, it might make more sense to do that more isolated where you don't need that real-time connection. Exactly. And those are some key examples of thinking about when one versus another might work better or worse. Yeah, I think so many of us just want to get the message out that we don't really think about the channel and how that channel can impact what we're trying to do. So that's a really key bit of advice.

Your new book has the subtitle, The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication. So I got to ask, what are some of these secrets? Let us in. When it comes to books on business or improvement, I really like when there's a framework to organize all this stuff because it helps me remember it. So I think the best answer for this is to think about the framework that I introduced in the book, which is the PING framework, which should be easy to remember because the book's titled PING. The PING framework stands for P, Perspective Taking.

And that's the idea that when you're interacting virtually, you're often much more self-focused. So whether you're just looking at text on a screen, or even if you're doing video, there's just a little square of the person you're looking at. And it's not the same as when they're standing right in front of you. So we end up looking at things from our own perspective, and we tend to be much more overconfident than we should be about our communication because we're not taking the other person's perspective and realizing that it's different than us. They might read our emotions different.

I is initiative. So it's thinking about what is missing from a given mode and how can I add it back in?

One of the examples that I often talk about with my students and executives is about when it comes to small talk. So I know it's been a topic on your show previously, but the thing about small talk, many people hate it for good reason. It takes up time. So it's a productivity waste. But on the other side of that, small talk is useful for building trust. We trust what we know. We trust who we know.

and it creates warp. Research has found that, for instance, in negotiation studies, when they had participants negotiate over text-based communication, there was much less small talk than when there was in person. So what they did is they had some of those participants who were engaging in a text-based negotiation have a quick phone call where they just schmoozed for a few minutes and then they went to text-based communication to negotiate.

And those negotiators ended up doing a whole lot better than those who didn't engage in schmoozing beforehand. So taking that initiative just to have a short phone call before some intense interaction can be really useful. Then N, nonverbal. That's the idea that we send a lot of different nonverbal behavior over virtual communication than we do in person. And it's important to be aware of that.

Typos can send emotion. Time of day can send signals of power. There's a whole bunch of different things that happen virtually that just don't happen in person. And those are really key for making sure that our messages are interpreted as we intend. And then lastly is G for goals. There's not one best mode. It depends on what your goal is in a situation. For example, cameras on versus cameras off calls.

The idea here is people have strong preferences on it, but research shows that it depends what your goal is here. So if your goal is you want to make a strong impression for someone you don't know well, you want to show you're engaged, VideoZone is really good for that.

But if you are trying to save energy, if you're trying to focus, video off is better because research has evidence showing Zoom fatigue or video conferencing fatigue. This idea that being on camera is really exhausting because we're staring at ourselves, analyzing nonverbal behavior. And there are all these things that happen when we're not in person that can drain energy from interactions. So if it's a new interaction, maybe video's on or better.

But if it is someone you know really well, strong impressions already built, they know you're going to be engaged, then you might as well turn that video off because it'll help you to save energy. Bringing it all together, the PING framework, P perspective taking, I initiative and nonverbal, G goals. Throughout my book, I tie each of the recommendations into that framework to help make it more memorable and more usable.

I love a good framework, and I love one that I can remember, and Ping is very memorable. You spend in your book a lot of time talking about richness. What does richness mean in the context of communication, and why should we be concerned about it? Richness is this idea about how similar is a mode to face-to-face interactions, and that's generally how it's defined.

But you can think about it as a single dimension. There are different components that make up richness. The two main ones are synchronicity, whether it's real time or not, and cue variety. How similar are the degree of cues or nonverbal behaviors to those that are in person? And just because two modes seem similar in one dimension doesn't mean they aren't. For instance, email and instant message

Both have a similar type of cues available. You can use emoticons, text, but they differ in terms of expected synchronicity. People tend to respond to instant messages quicker, hence instant messages. But the thing is, even small differences on richness have a huge impact on the outcomes of our interactions. Thinking about video calls and in-person interactions.

Fairly similar, except you can't see the bottom half of the person, which in many video meetings is probably a good thing. What also happens is with video calls, there's a very slight lack due to data transfer speeds over the internet, whereas in person, there's no lag because you're just talking to each other.

Some studies have found that even that slight lag in video calls can make conversations run a little more awkwardly. There can be more silences. We can interrupt each other more because we're both waiting for the other person to finish or we thought they finished, but they didn't. Even these lags in the milliseconds can end up changing the conversational dynamics.

And there's a variety of other ways that richness also plays into interactions. As an example, when we're interacting virtually, it can feel awkward to use richer modes of communication. So if you're reaching out to help someone or to reconnect with an old colleague, there's this idea that people would just rather do via email. And research shows email just feels less awkward. What authors who studied this found is that

Richer modes like telephone or video end up being more effective. It builds trust more because it's richer. And then when participants rated it after the fact, they note that it's not actually any more awkward.

So we think it's going to be awkward before the fact to move from email to just calling someone or having a video meeting. But in reality, it works out better and it's not any less awkward. That said, especially in the work context, try and proceed a call with an instant message or email. That way you're not interrupting whatever the other person is doing. So you could still get the benefits of that mode without necessarily having the interruptive effect of forcing them to talk whenever you decide.

Thank you for defining richness and for giving some useful examples and insight into what it is and how we can consider using it. I want to dive deeper into what you just said about alerting people in advance of reaching out. In your ping model, the nonverbal piece, you've got a lot of ways of looking at nonverbal that I don't think many of us think of. You even use the example of the time of day you set a meeting can be a way of establishing power.

Can you share your way of looking at nonverbal communication when we're virtual? Most of us who study nonverbal communication think about what do you do with your body and your voice, but there's also the use of time, the use of space. Can you share some of your thoughts on that? For nonverbal communication, one of the most illustrative examples to think about this is one that Haley Blunden from American University actually led a research project with me on,

And it's on email typos. In this set of studies, we've had three findings. First, email typos generally make you look less intelligent. The second finding was that email typos can relay emotion. It's like putting your fist up in the air, where your fist up in the air can make you seem happier or more proud or more excited, but it depends on the context.

So in angry emails, typos made you seem angrier. In happy emails, they made you seem happier. And then we had a third finding, which was in the context of emotional messages, there was a decreased penalty on intelligence for typos. So put simply, typos make us look less intelligent, right?

But if there's another reason, such as emotion, the other person says, oh, it's because they're emotional. This matches other research. Studies show that having sent from my iPhone in your email signature decreases the penalty of typos because they assume it's sent from your iPhone. Knowing someone's from a different culture reduces the penalty for intelligence for grammar errors because English might not be their first language.

So the key kind of theory behind all of this is this idea that in virtual communication, there's often missing information. As recipients of it, we're searching for reasons for this missing information.

Whatever is there is what we attach it to. If it's clear the person was emotional or rushed or whatever else, we use that information to fill in the gaps in our understanding and assume it's because of that. The problem becomes that the person on the recipient side who's making these guesses is often guessing incorrectly.

So realizing how other people interpret our messages and making sure we add in extra information to make sure they don't have to fill in those gaps can be one of the most useful things that you do.

Wow. That's a lesson in attribution theory, but also in some practical things. You've just totally changed my perspective on something. One of the first things I do when I upgrade my phone is I remove the automatic signature that says sent from iPhone because I felt like that was not useful information.

But based on what you just said, maybe what I should do is change it to say sent from iPhone while likely rushing so that everybody who gets one of my typos attributes it to that and not to the fact that I'm not as intelligent. It depends if your goal there is to take typos or not, because that also is sending other information as well. You didn't feel the need to sit down at your computer to email them. Maybe sometimes it's a good signal that you're sending it from the go. Maybe other times that's a bad signal.

That could be seen as a power play potentially. So you do have to be wary of what other information you're sending from that. But with typos, it helps. With other things, it may not. And that's that nonverbal piece I was thinking about. So people are reading into, oh, he just sent me a text.

She sent me an email about that. Maybe there's some meaning behind it. Maybe she was more thoughtful than he. So not only do we make choices for ourselves, but we have to think about the impact of the choice of channel. What message is that sending?

Andrew, this has been a fantastic conversation. I am certainly considering changing a lot of my behaviors based on what we've said. Before we end, I like to ask all my guests three questions. One I make up for you and the other two are similar for everyone. Are you up for that? Yep, definitely. Excellent. We'll be right back to continue our conversation. But first, a word from our sponsors. Their support and yours helps make our show possible.

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So not everybody has the benefit of actually seeing you as I do as we're speaking. What's your advice and guidance on what we do with what's behind us when we're virtually communicating? Are there some best practices we should follow? The evidence when it comes to video backgrounds or how you look on video does show that they do matter. Having good lighting, having a good camera. And in terms of what's behind you, so there's been some studies on the virtual backgrounds and they show that...

Having a virtual background of a bookshelf or plants tends to be seen as most professional. Blurred is somewhere in the middle. And then the novelty ones, an example of using the study was a walrus on ice, were seen as the least professional. So you want to use some common sense if you're using a virtual background. But then there's another set of studies about what shows in your actual background. And what they've found is that when there are things that show who you are,

So you want to, of course, have the professional stuff. So bookshelves, always good. Maybe some plants. So in my case, a picture of my dogs and a couple other little tidbits about me can be useful for creating some social cohesion. An example in the study, they had things that showed people were apparent. A number one dad mug. And they found that for other people who were parents, they felt they could trust that person more.

So having those opportunities to potentially have conversations, to show a window into who you are while remaining professional can be incredibly helpful.

So the fact that I have a Lego flower that I made behind me gives some insight into something about me. I'll take that as a positive. The one thing I want to advise people against, and I assume you would agree with this, is you need to be authentic. I can imagine somebody hearing what you just said and said, oh, I'm going to manipulate by putting a number one dad mug and I don't have any kids. We need to be authentic because just like you mentioned around AI, that if the language you use

influences how people see you. If somebody were to find out that you're not telling the truth, that would be a problem. Exactly. And I have some research too in virtuality and authenticity, and it's a major factor that drives satisfaction of the other party. So it's not just being authentic in what you say or do, but also being seen as choosing the right mode

Making sure that you don't have unintentional nonverbal behavior leaking through. When video calls, for instance, people might see that we're trying to be happy for them, but we're actually not because maybe something happened earlier in our day that's really bad. So authenticity is a topic that is not just relevant for in-person, but is incredibly relevant to virtual interactions, especially because the person can't physically see you. So they're making a lot of assessments of authenticity to fill in those gaps.

Really, I want to put an exclamation point. Authenticity is so important in all communication. And what I'm hearing you say is in virtual communication, it's even more important. Let me ask question number two. I'll be curious to hear your answer. Who is a communicator that you admire and why? I'm guessing there may have been a chance you would have gotten this answer before because he's many people's. But for me, it's Adam Grant.

I took his first class that he taught at Wharton. It was just inspirational, the degree to which he motivated students. It was one of the driving factors that drove me to getting a PhD and coming into academia was just seeing the impact he had on students and how he was able to just draw everyone into a topic that many people came in thinking wasn't going to be that interesting. Yeah.

So this notion of your passion and connecting that and sharing that and making it relevant to others. Final question. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? For a successful communication, I recommend three things that start with

pausing and taking a breath. We're overloaded by communication, especially virtual communication. We've got full inboxes. We've got back-to-back video meetings. And it's so easy to just keep on going and not take a second to pause. And step two is consider if what you're doing is actually the best. We tend to fall in this trap of the default bias, which is this idea that we just do whatever we've normally done or what's right in front of us.

So if we always have a meeting for X, we continue to have a meeting for X. Or if we have an email for Y, we give an email for Y. Or if the conversation is already happening in email, we don't take the initiative and say, hey, let's switch this to a phone call. I think that'd be more productive.

And so actually getting out of that default mindset can be incredibly helpful for improving productivity, your relationships, and your overall well-being. Because you may find that you decrease your communication load by being thoughtful about what's the most productive mode and when, as opposed to just going with the flow. And lastly, my third ingredient is keep learning.

especially when it comes to technology and communication technology, there's new advances every day. People are changing how they use things. So keeping up with the research, the science, and understanding what are the best strategies for what, how is that changing, can be one of the best things that you can do because communication technology is such a dynamic landscape. I really like those three things. I'm going to take them in reverse order. Staying up to date and really understanding

Challenging yourself to explore and learn the new technology makes a big difference. There are things that, as you said, are getting better all the time. I think about when we all first went to virtual and where we are today, not just in our comfort level with it, but just what we can do.

I like to talk about turning habits into choices. Many of us communicate in that default mode and taking the time to make a conscious choice rather than just do what you've always done might make the communication better and your life easier. And then finally, taking a pause. We are often rushing in all of our communication and taking that beat, taking that moment can really make a difference. And if we do it in the presence of others to show that we're listening or to show that we're being thoughtful, it can have an added benefit.

Andrew, this has been a great conversation. You shared so many useful tips and helped me and I hope everybody listening think a little bit differently about how we show up when we communicate virtually and what tools and channels we choose to use. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about virtual communication best practices, please listen to episode 53 with Jonathan Lavov and episode 31 with me.

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