Damaging Results of Mandated Return to Office – It's Worse Than We Thought

Re:Damaging Results of Mandated Return to Office – It's Wors... by hosh on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @04:26AM (#36503809)

To add to that about Slack — speaking is a distinct skill from writing, engaging in different part of the brain. The skills you use for speaking in person does not automatically translates to writing, let alone the various social nuances that comes with text based communication.

The skills you might have picked up to be someone effective while in person doesn’t mean you will be effective working through Slack. Zoom is not a perfect substitute — much of the non-verbal communication that happens in person is no longer there; plus, if you’re not using the Zoom chat as the backchannel, you miss out on effective use of Zoom.

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Re:Damaging Results of Mandated Return to Office – It's Wors... by n4r9 on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @04:53AM (#36503982)

True. Anticipating context is one example of a skill that verbal communicators sometimes lack. For someone to understand your statement/question, it needs to be framed in the language they use everyday, and not to lack any crucial information.

In a verbal conversation, you can whittle down to this by asking questions and rephrasing the other person. In remote situations you need to spend time thinking about what information to include and how to phrase it, before even touching the keyboard.

I still get messages along the lines of "Hi, I'm trying to do X but it's not working! Can you look into it?". With a bit of forethought this can become "Hi. I'm trying to do X because client C wants to be able to do Y. I've tried action A but I'm getting issue I. I looked into the logs and found L, so then I also tried action A2 but ran into issue I2. Here is a screenshot of what I mean. I am on environment E and using configuration C. Do you have any suggestions for how I could proceed?"

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