Rehumanize Your Business Read online

  Hiding behind a cloak of digital anonymity, cyberbullying, trolling, and igniting flame wars online is the theme of an important opinion piece published in the New York Times. In “The Epidemic of Facelessness,” writer Stephen Marche connects the absence of the human face to significant communication and behavior problems. He draws on Plato's 2,400-year-old myth about the Ring of Gyges, which makes its wearer invisible at will, to illustrate the disinhibiting effects of not being seen and the corrupting effects of anonymity. Today, the Gyges effect is used to describe these monstrous behaviors of “keyboard warriors” who hide behind the screen as they say things they'd never say if they had to look the person on the other end of their cyberbullying or trolling in the eye.

  The resolve is clear. “As communication and exchange come at a remove, the flight back to the face takes on a new urgency,” writes Marche.17 Whether in sales, marketing, support, project management, or any other role, you can't afford to continue relying exclusively on faceless digital communication. We need to rehumanize our communication and our businesses.

  SO, EMOJIS?

  An emoji or emoticon may have a “face,” but it's an insufficient replacement for a smiling human. If you get especially friendly with your customers or clients, you may add emojis to your business communication. Over the days, weeks, or months of a B2C sales process that starts a customer lifecycle, the relationship may reach that level of comfort, familiarity, and informality. But not every client or client relationship is the same.

  If instead you're in B2B enterprise sales and trying to close a six-, seven-, or even eight-figure deal, it's unlikely that the SVP or C-level executive will accept your crying, laughing, round yellow “faces” as useful and professional expressions – at least not until the relationship is well established. Your truth likely falls somewhere in between these two examples, but you should know your recipient before dropping an emoticon as a substitute for your absent, human face.

  We add emojis to make clearer the intention of our words and to add a little personality or flair. Are you serious or are you joking? Punch in that smiley face. But which smiley face does your recipient get? And do they read it the same way you do? Different operating systems often “speak” different emojis and different people often interpret the same emoji differently. The authors of a study titled “‘Blissfully Happy' or ‘Ready to Fight': Varying Interpretations of Emoji” found that only 4.5% of emoji symbols examined “have consistently low variance in their sentiment interpretations. Conversely, in 25% of the cases where participants rated the same rendering, they did not agree on whether the sentiment was positive, neutral, or negative.”18

  In other words, emojis and emoticons don't make things clear; they add to the misunderstandings. But that hasn't slowed their use. As they become more common, they become more acceptable. Still, they can't compete with human, nonverbal cues for context, clarity, meaning, intention, or connection.

  REPAIRING EMAIL

  While our communication fragments across email, text messaging, messaging apps, social messaging, social networks, or other channels, we're still restricting our most important and most valuable messages to plain text far more often than not. Most of your communication and exchange comes “at a remove,” to use Marche's words. Well intentioned or not, you often don that cloak of digital anonymity. You're hiding behind the same black text on the same white screen, even though you've got a lot riding on your messages' outcomes. There's a new urgency to repairing email – to making “the flight back to the face.”

  There's a new urgency to restoring a critical, missing element … you!

  Whether you're teaching, training, or selling, you add so much meaning and value to your communication. As you'll soon understand clearer than ever, people need to see you. Trust and rapport. Attention and understanding. Accuracy and transparency. These are all achieved faster and more effectively when you make the flight back to the face.

  NOTES

  1. Backman, Maurie. “How Much Time Are You Wasting on Work Emails?” The Motley Fool. September 21, 2017. https://www.fool.com/careers/2017/09/21/how-much-time-are-you-wasting-on-work-emails.aspx.

  2. Dubé, Dani-Elle. “This Is How Much Time You Spend On Work Emails Every Day, According to a Canadian Survey.” Global News. April 21, 2017. https://globalnews.ca/news/3395457/this-is-how-much-time-you-spend-on-work-emails-every-day-according-to-a-canadian-survey/.

  3. “2018 Adobe Consumer Email Survey.” Adobe Systems Incorporated. August 17, 2018. https://www.slideshare.net/adobe/2018-adobe-consumer-email-survey.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Bauer, Emily. “15 Outrageous Email Spam Statistics That Still Ring True in 2018.” Propeller. February 1, 2018. https://www.propellercrm.com/blog/email-spam-statistics.

  6. “15 Text Messaging Statistics Every Business Should Know.” Intelligent Contacts, Inc. Accessed August 27, 2018. https://intelligentcontacts.com/15-text-messaging-statistics-every-business-should-know/.

  7. Madrigal, Alexis. “Why No One Answers Their Phone Anymore.” The Atlantic. May 31, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/ring-ring-ring-ring/561545/.

  8. Crother, Brooke. “Nearly Half All Cell Phone Calls Will Be Scams by 2019, Report Says.” Fox News Network, LLC. September 21, 2018. https://www.foxnews.com/tech/nearly-half-all-cell-phone-calls-will-be-scams-by-2019-report-says.

  9. Email Statistics Report, 2018–2022. London: The Radicati Group, Inc., 2018. Accessed August 27, 2018. https://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Email_Statistics_Report,_2018–2022_Executive_Summary.pdf.

  10. “Email Continues to Deliver Strong ROI and Value for Marketers.” eMarketer. September 12, 2016. https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Email-Continues-Deliver-Strong-ROI-Value-Marketers/1014461.

  11. “2018 Email Marketing Industry Census.” eConsultancy of Centaur Media. June 2018. https://econsultancy.com/reports/email-census/.

  12. “The Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2018.” HubSpot. Accessed August 28, 2018. https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics.

  13. Roesler, Peter. “Study Shows Email Marketing Still Popular and Effective with Millennials.” Inc. March 28, 2016. Accessed August 30, 2018. https://www.inc.com/peter-roesler/study-shows-email-marketing-still-popular-and-effective-with-millennials.html.

  14. Brodsky, Andrew. 2018. “Chapter 3: Overcrafting of Business Correspondence: The Effectiveness, Productivity, and Affective Consequences of Impression Management in text-based communication.” PhD diss., Harvard University.

  15. Kruger, Justin, Epley, Nicholas, Parker, Jason, and Ng, Zhi-Wen. “Egocentrism Over E-mail: Can We Communicate As Well As We Think?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89, no. 6 (2005): 925.

  16. Schroeder, Juliana, and Epley, Nicholas. “Speaking Louder Than Words: Voice Reveals the Presence of a Humanlike Mind.” Unpublished manuscript, University of Chicago (2014).

  17. Marche, Stephen. “The Epidemic of Facelessness.” The New York Times, February 14, 2015. Accessed September 5, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/opinion/sunday/the-epidemic-of-facelessness.html.

  18. Miller, Hannah, Thebault-Spieker, Jacob, Chang, Shuo, Johnson, Isaac, Terveen, Loren, and Hecht, Brent. “‘Blissfully Happy' or ‘Ready to Fight': Varying Interpretations of Emoji.” Proceedings of ICWSM 2016 (2016).

  CHAPTER 3

  Video: The Personal, Rehumanizing Tool

  “I see you.” In the 2009 film Avatar, a huge box office and critical success, the Na'vi greeted each other with these words. The words mean that you're present and attentive—that you're completely open and welcoming to the other person … or sentient humanoid, in the case of the Na'vi. We need to see each other. And we have a deep need to be seen. The literal and emotional aspects of seeing and being seen are fundamental to the human experience. When used to build personal and professional relationships, video helps us see and be seen.

  RELATIONSHIPS ARE THE WHOLE POINT

  The Grant Study began at Harvard
more than 80 years ago with the goal of discovering how to live a long, healthy, and fulfilling life. Initial participants in the longitudinal study were 238 Harvard sophomores. Over the years, the participant groups expanded to include inner-city Boston residents and the original participants' children, at which point it became the Grant and Glueck Study. The researchers considered various factors and data, including career, financial, social, intelligence, genetic, mental, physical, and other types of measures.

  Across several populations, across decades, and across criteria, the greatest predictor of health was consistent: our relationships with other people. Robert Waldinger, the study's director, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and the source of one of the most popular TED talks of all time describes the study's “revelation” in this way: “The surprising finding is that our relationships and how happy we are in our relationships has a powerful influence on our health.”1

  Our personal success, life satisfaction, and well-being are enabled through the people in our lives. And so is our business success. As Gary Vaynerchuk offered in the opening to his book The Thank You Economy, “No relationships should be taken for granted. They are what life is all about, the whole point. How we cultivate our relationships is often the greatest determinant of the type of life we get to live. Business is no different.”2 The personal/professional connection is also offered in The Go-Giver, a classic from Bob Burg and John David Mann: “A genuinely sound business principle will apply anywhere in life – in your friendships, in your marriage, anywhere. That's the true bottom line.” This was offered in support of their Law of Authenticity, which states that “the most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself.”3

  So, connecting and communicating with others improves our lives and our businesses. We do this best when we're present with others. We do it best in person, face to face. Think about the people involved in your personal and professional success: family and friends, team members and recruits, prospects and customers, suppliers and partners. Think about all the people who help make your achievements possible.

  In terms of connecting and communicating with these people, are you more effective in a typed-out email or text message, or are you more effective on the phone?

  Most people say they're better on the phone. Voice, pace, and tone allow you to express yourself more clearly. And the feedback loop—the give and take of a conversation—creates a much richer experience for both people. Any two people anywhere in the world with a phone and an internet, cellular, or landline connection can enjoy this experience, no matter the distance. You just need to coordinate the time (and the time zones!).

  Similar question, but with a new option: Are you more effective on the phone or more effective in person?

  Nearly everyone says they're more effective in person. Take all the benefits of talking over the phone, but add in face, posture, body language, distance, eye contact, hand gestures, and all those rich, nonverbal cues that our brains are wired to receive from one another. We're fellow human beings. We're social creatures. Because of the subtlety, nuance, emotion, energy, and all those little things that just don't come through our typed-out or spoken words alone, we're better in person. A deep history and millennia of evolution have refined this wiring.

  We need to see each other. Sending personal video helps fulfill that need when time and distance get in your way.

  MILLENNIA OF HUMAN BRAIN TRAINING

  As a species, humans have been speaking to one another for about 150,000 years. There's a great debate about this number; estimates range from 50,000 years to more than one million years, well before our evolution into homo sapiens.4 You can imagine the difficulty in figuring that out. Early symbols and writing can be found; the materials' dates of the origin can be established. It's far more challenging to determine when we started speaking to each other. There's no record of a spoken word—not prior to our ability to record audio, anyway. We have to infer from indirect data the ability, hence the debate. Rather than get into the debate's particulars, though, we'll work from the conservative end of the range—150,000 years. Most of that time, we've spoken to our fellow humans exclusively face to face. Only in the past handful of generations could we record and transmit our faces and voices across time and distance using technology.

  Our brains have more than 100,000 years of experience, training, and refinement in spoken, face-to-face communication.

  So, how long have humans been writing? The oldest known cave paintings in Chauvet Cave in southern France date back 30,000 years to the Ice Age or Upper Paleolithic era.5 Twelve thousand years is the age of the oldest known pictograph, “an early method of writing in which pictures are used to convey meaning—similar to hieroglyphics.”6 Five thousand years ago, the transition from capturing visual images in paintings and drawings to capturing speech sounds in writing was made by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia. Called cuneiform, this form of writing evolved from a symbol-based accounting system into a system of phonetic symbols. Over the next several hundred years, the Sumerians developed it into a purer alphabet that was eventually used to capture poems and literature.7 Egyptian hieroglyphics also date back to this period and possessed some of the uniformity of an early form of alphabet.

  Writing's evolution is richer and more nuanced than conveyed here, but the point should be clear. We've only been writing for about 5,000 years – one thirtieth or 3.3% of the amount of time we've been speaking to one another. The true ratio of writing to speaking is even smaller than that, though. How much smaller? Add a zero and make it one three hundredth, or 0.3%, because nearly that entire time the vast majority of the human population was illiterate. Literacy rates only started spreading into the population at large—unevenly, of course—about 500 years ago.8

  Only 500 years of widespread reading and writing; this amount of time is too short to produce major evolutionary changes to master the complexity of producing and decoding strings of symbols (reading and writing text). The gap between 150,000 and 500 is made obvious in Figure 3.1. Scientists are only starting to understand the relationship between the brain circuits used for reading and writing and those used for seeing and speaking, but one study's authors gracefully observe that “a preliterate brain must adapt on the fly, so to speak, in learning how to process written words, rather than being able to rely upon evolutionarily ancient modifications of the visual system pathways.”9

  FIGURE 3.1 History of Human Speech, Writing, and Literacy

  This explains why we struggle to craft effective emails and overestimate our ability to do so; reading and writing is adapted. This also explains why restoring the messenger to the message with video is so effective; seeing and speaking are ancient. We've been communicating with one another face to face for approximately 300 times longer than we've been communicating through written words. It's more natural and fundamentally human.

  When you're hiring a new salesperson, you're not likely assigning a writing test as part of the employment screen. You're asking them to “sell me this pen” (come on, you know you've done it) and collecting a DISC assessment or Caliper profile to gain insights into a candidate's strengths, motivations, behavioral tendencies, and communication style. When you're hiring someone for the client care team, you're evaluating abilities to empathize, connect, defuse, and transform. You require competence in reading and writing, but you're not looking for a modern-day Jane Austen or William Shakespeare. You don't need Strunk or White. While putting J.K. Rowling or John Grisham on your outbounding team might win you some calls back, your new salesperson need not turn out a 200,000-word novel.

  Instead of evaluating and hiring talent based on interpersonal skills and then hiding these professionals behind voicemails and typed-out emails, empower them with video.

  After you land and onboard the best person, you tend to cloak them in emails and voicemails. You need to help your company's representatives shine. You need to unlock their potential and put them back into a true sales or service role. Empowering th
em with video recording, sending, and tracking is a leap toward the rehumanization of your business.

  OUR FACES SPEAK THE SAME LANGUAGE

  While we struggle to produce competent writing in one of the thousands of written languages in use today, our faces all speak the same language. Human facial expression of emotion is both universal and innate. We all do it the exact same way – across societies, across cultures, and across history. There's a rich body of research built by different researchers at different universities and institutions using different methodologies and participants in different cities, countries, and continents. All conducted across different decades. And despite these differences, the work points to one key finding: human emotions are expressed the same way through our faces.

  With the goal of surveying the best research on nonverbal behavior and making practical the key findings, the authors of Nonverbal Communication: Science and Applications describe facial expressions of emotion in this way: “The ability to read facial expressions of emotion can help your interactions with anyone regardless of his or her race, culture, ethnicity, nationality, sex, religion, or age.”10 Even when we speak to people through an interpreter, we understand what they're saying with their faces; it's universal.