How Ellipses and Emoticons Can Warm Your Virtual Workplace
We all now work in an environment that makes face-to-face communication increasingly rare. We travel a lot for work, some of us work best out of the office, and sometimes our top team members live half the country away.
Net, net: most of us are working in an environment where face-to-face communication is the exception—not the rule.
Yet despite this change in proximity, our professional needs are still the same: we have to lead our people and drive results! And it’s just plain harder to do that when we can’t regularly sit with them to hash things out face-to-face, and when everything’s being handled in email.
In this environment, it pays to consciously add a little of that warmth back to your virtual communication. One tactic—shift the tone of your emails when you’re dealing with your colleagues. Move away from the very standard formalistic corporate email speak, and move towards wording that sounds a little more like a hallway conversation.
Don’t lapse into inappropriate non-business language. Don’t start sending out a whole bunch of overly personal emails. But go ahead and introduce a measured degree of emotion into your messages. Feel free to convey a conversational tone with your colleagues instead of typing every message like you’re summarizing a bland issue for a dispassionate third party.
And if that means dropping the occasional emoticon? Have at it. The occasional—and I do mean occasional—one or two won’t be a huge problem. Informal elements can have their place in the workplace too. As you relax your fingers you’ll find that something as simple as the ellipse can make a huge difference in adding a more conversational feel to your messages, and go a long way towards helping you sound more human… I think you get what I mean.
