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An overwhelming majority of professionals worldwide regularly use written communication tools at work, whether email, instant messaging services or documentation tools, according to a recent study by US software company Atlassian.
And although workers are increasingly coming into the office, they are not necessarily communicating face-to-face with their colleagues: a survey by Unispace found that working people spend most of their time alone at their workstations when they’re onsite.
So, it’s hardly surprising that 44% of those surveyed by Atlassian say writing is their main mode of communication. Yet, 61% of office workers claim that written communication is the most susceptible to misinterpretation and misunderstanding.
The reason? Employees are taking less and less time to draft the messages they send to their peers. These can often be filled with abbreviations and acronyms such as “ASAP” (“as soon as possible”), “FYI” (“for your information”), and “TBC” (“to be confirmed”), for the sake of efficiency.
But if you write in haste, you run the risk of forgetting important information. As a result, an email of just a few lines can leave a team pondering it for hours.
Indeed, a third of employees surveyed by Atlassian say they waste more than 40 hours a year trying to decode and interpret their colleagues’ messages.
“This poses a serious challenge for businesses: in the time that knowledge workers are wondering what their colleagues mean or what their manager wants from them, they could be doing mission critical work,” the company pointed out.
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To avoid this loss of time and energy, it’s a good idea to think about how to make yourself understood. Email is useful for attachments and leaving a virtual paper trail, while instant messaging is more appropriate for sharing information quickly, such as a change to the time of a meeting. Picking up the phone is the best way to explain a situation or a problem in a more subjective way.
If you opt for the written word, make sure you also respect the rules of grammar and spelling. Text-message language is not universally understood or even appreciated in the workplace.
Expressive punctuation is a double-edged sword: some people don’t like seeing one or more exclamation marks in a professional message, while others see it as a way of adding feeling to their exchanges.
Meanwhile, emoticons are more consensual: 78% of office workers surveyed by Atlassian say they are more likely to ignore a message that doesn’t contain emojis. Generation Z employees are particularly receptive to these little pictograms, with 68% of this group feeling more motivated when their messages receive emoji reactions.
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