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It's all context and the work environment and the habits of the people you're dealing with. Phone calls can potentially be rude and disruptive because effective
by mwfunk 10y ago
It's all context and the work environment and the habits of the people you're dealing with. Phone calls can potentially be rude and disruptive because effectively you're telling another person that whatever you want in this instant is more important than whatever they're doing, no matter what they're doing. They have to stop everything to deal with the phone call, in the same way as if someone just barged into their office uninvited, sat down, and blindly started talking, ignoring whatever else might have been going on at the time.
In engineering environments, phone calls also tend to be ineffective ways to communicate technical information, whereas email threads (terse or not) preserve the history and context of decision making processes, which can be revisited or cited as needed.
Also, nowadays more and more people simply hate the experience of talking on the phone and would prefer that it didn't even exist in their lives as a communication device. So there's a whole personal preference angle that's independent of the pragmatic/effectiveness angles.
None of which is to say that there's anything wrong with a phone call, just that it really depends on where you work, what you do, who you work with, what they do, etc.
- douche 10y agoI feel like instant messaging bridges a lot of the chasm between an email and a phone call. It is immediate, but it does not interrupt as badly as a phonecall. It is persistent (assuming you have an enterprise-grade system that has archiving). It is text, so there are no issues with dialect or pronunciation.
- BeetleB 10y ago>I feel like instant messaging bridges a lot of the chasm between an email and a phone call. It is immediate, but it does not interrupt as badly as a phonecall. I wrote a comment elsewhere, but for me, IM is worse than both. It grabs your attention as immediately as a phone call, but the one who initiates it can leave you hanging wasting more time than a phone call would. If someone called me and started talking to me and then just stopped (without hanging up), that would be a no-no in most places. Yet this is acceptable behavior in IM. If you are using IM and working on something while busily responding to IM's, you are multitasking, which is what I want to avoid. If you need it within a few hours, call me and let me know. Otherwise email me and I'll get to it at some point (usually the same day).
- inimino 10y agoJust turn off the notifications. IM is only an interruption if you let it be one.
- tene 10y agoThat's exactly correct. If your communication is in fact important enough to barge in disruptively and demand their full attention immediately, a phone call is appropriate. If your communication is not that important, then send an email and expect to wait, because they're doing other things. Either it's time-sensitive or it isn't. Either you need an immediate reply, or you don't. Why bother being anxious and nervous about something if it's not time-sensitive? If it's time-sensitive, then just make a call. Where does this bizarre communication anxiety come from?
- gregmac 10y ago> Either it's time-sensitive or it isn't. Either you need an immediate reply, or you don't. I think part of the problem comes from differing opinions on what is actually "time sensitive". I think a lot of the trouble comes from someone using a time-sensitive communication method (phone, physically coming to your desk) on something the other person doesn't see that way. I certainly have less empathy for someone that has time-sensitive problems through their own poor planning (aka "Your failure to plan is not my emergency"). Everyone makes mistakes, but some people seem to continually have their own self-created emergency all the time, and it's completely draining.