The High Cost of Ignoring Body Language in Professional Communication
OUR INTERACTIONS
As social animals, we humans focus for 50% or more of our entire interaction on nonverbal communication (NVC) – how is someone saying what they are saying. When we do this, we are understanding people’s thoughts, feelings or intentions while they speak. We can thus prepare for what to expect, what to elaborate or cut short, how to follow up, whom to get in touch with, and so much more. Even cultures that are low context do communicate a lot through their nonverbals. Our expressions might sometimes be culture dependent but our need for NVC runs across the human race.
In a world of social distancing and the rising focus on technology and remote working, where we prefer to either write to people, speak over the telephone, conduct video calls (a lot of times with the video off) or speak with masks on, the nonverbal communication gets cut down in varying degrees depending on which of the above modes we choose.
WHERE NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION IS A MUST
All walks of life, all stages of life, all professions, all roles that we play! Right from growing up and understanding the world around us to building crucial emotional and social life skills as children to when we become parents and need to communicate with our children. In the professional world, right from when you join an organization and need to build bonds, to shine out, perform well, climb the corporate ladder and finally be an example for your teams, everywhere nonverbal communication is an absolute must. Teachers, doctors, lawyers, interviewers, everyone needs the right body language to connect with their counterparts and also understand them for what they are.
WHY CONVERSATIONS ARE NOT HOLISTICS IN TODAY'S TIME
Over time, the quality of our face to face interactions is also going down. Below are my observations
Attention span of humans in general is going down because of the constant need to multitask. The proof of this we see in our trainings also because the format is changing to make everything stimulating so that the audience stays engaged all the time. If so much effort needs to be put into holding others’ attention span, how are they looking back at me and understanding the unsaid that my body language is indicating? Also, observing the world around us means we should be able to use the entire field of vision (180 degrees) in front of us. With laptop screens and mobiles that we are seeing almost all the time, there is a danger to this field of vision going down hence our capacity to absorb rich information from around us might go down, requiring more effort or picking up half the information as we could do previously.
When such is the case, our accuracy of understanding others goes down, again leading to scope for miscommunication.
Not only this, because we are multi-tasking or distracted by our devices, even during in person conversations, we are referring to the device while asking the other person to keep speaking to us. One, you are only listening to half of what the other person is saying, and two, you are entirely missing out on their body language when while having face to face interaction.
WHAT VIDEO CALLS MISS OUT
Let’s start with a small example. The most crucial part of a conversation is eye contact and this is absolutely missing in remote communication. While I might want to maintain more eye contact with someone to indicate my interest in their content, show confidence while speaking myself, or give hints of disinterest to someone while they are speaking, use of the right amount of eye contact with the right person is necessary. How does one judge this in multi person video calls? Also, If I look around to see people’s reactions on my screen, this comes across as “darting eyes” to the other person watching me on the video call. Hence, totally misunderstood. Again, if I want to project direct eye contact, I need to look directly into the laptop’s camera. If I do that, I am missing out on watching the reactions that people are giving to what I am saying because I am no longer looking at other individuals while speaking.
This is just one example. Here is another one – when different hierarchies participate together, video calls can become rather intimidating for juniors due to the close-up focus on their faces and thus their reactions. Because of this, their body cues might include a lot of self touching or other signals of nervousness. Managers would have to decipher whether these stress signals are because of the video call format or because of how the individual is reacting during the conversation.
In remote conversations, we miss out on facets like body orientation. To explain this, if we like listening to someone more than others, or identify more with a thought process or even like an individual more, we tend to orient or turn our body towards them. This aspect gets missed out on during video calls since we are no longer seated in a physical group. For team managers usually this sort of information would be a treasure to understand team bonding – which team members are aligned with one another, are these issues developing in the team, etc. For sales people, this information helps manage their sales pitch, schedule follow up meetings better and so on.
These are but a few examples. If we start exploring the depths at which lack of nonverbal communication is getting missed out, the list would be endless.
WHY NOT PHONE CALLS
Similarly when we are habitually speaking with someone just over the phone, we cannot build rapport through use of body language techniques. If we start indicating everything verbally, conversations can become very verbose. Plus this would require a skill of constant introspection and deliberately voicing out everything you feel to the other person, making for less natural interactions, often digressing from the main topic.
DEBATE ABOUT EFFICIENCY OF MEETINGS
There are people who argue that meetings are a waste of time, for them the suggestion would be to have some SOPs in place to make meetings more productive like assigning specific tasks to individuals to perform to keep the meeting on track etc. You can choose to avoid physical meetings when only facts need to be shared. But for other reasons, there is no replacement for face to face interactions. In fact, there are times when managers should be having meetings (online or offline) where people interact outside work or have no fixed work agenda so that they can bond as teams.
HOW RELATIONSHIPS ARE IMPCATED
The impact of missed out nonverbal communication is huge in the formation of relationships. It is difficult to put down just how much research there is which establishes spending quality face to face time with people who matter to us in order to form relations and to keep the relations going. Even when families use gadgets on the dinner table, it has been reported to ruin family relations. So when we talk about interactions where people are not even present in each other’s company, this can have huge repercussions. If your better half has had a stressful day at work, how would you know about this when they are too tired to speak? Through their body language. If your child is changing in their behavior or attitude over the years while growing up, how can you compare their actions with those of yesteryears unless you are with them? The same goes for teams as well.
WHY PROFESSIONAL EFFCIENCY SUFFERS
Clients might not remain loyal, deals might be lost out on, employees would not feel a sense of belonging to their team or company, it can also lead to a serious identity crisis. Observations like an employee getting overburdened with work, untold friction between team members, promotion potential in a particular performer, a lot of these nuances are responsibilities of a team leader and require sharp NVC skills.
IMPACT ON MENTAL HEALTH
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You can get frustrated if someone who was responding to you yesterday stops doing so today and you have no way to know why. If you were present in person, their reactions could give you a cue. This over time can affect your anxiety, your mental health.
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If your colleague gets promoted and you don’t, there is no way to build rapport with your boss or HR for future because there is less opportunity for personal connect. Again a reason for people to feel work pressure.
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When emotions run high and your colleagues are not able to pick that up and support you, you might be overwhelmed with work and would break down one day.
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Even to understand your own emotions, you need to be able to closely introspect your own body language.
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If you can spot stress signals at an early stage and stop them then and there, it can prevent long term stress.
WHAT ORGANIZATIONS SHOULD BE WARY OF
The minute a new employee joins an organization and needs to get a feel of the work culture, the team culture, the organizational culture in general, team managers need to spend the right type of time and efforts into onboarding them. Here NVC plays a huge role in how warmly these individuals are accepted and made comfortable. They should also be able to first hand witness conversations, meetings, get to know fellow colleagues at their own time and convenience, and in each of these steps the body language of employees plays a part. When communication becomes remote, most conversations are either deliberate or planned. This seldom allows new joinees to witness chemistry in the team from a distance or natural bonding to happen within the team which is an essential part of team bonding.
In this new world, team managers will have to adapt new strategies to ensure these opportunities of interactions are occurring regularly. Also, loyalty to an organization might not be as high since bonding would be affected, and managers would not be able to engage in casual conversations with their team members, which gives the latter an opportunity to discover more of the personal side to their bosses, and hence be able to connect and identify with them at a personal level. Read more here: https://simplybodytalk.com/
CONCLUSION
When we are not able to understand the entire context of someone’s words, it can create a lot of misunderstanding. This has larger repercussions in deals not closing, revenue getting lost, teams wasting time on redoing stuff, projects not getting delivered on time, companies needing to rehire and retrain constantly when employees that don’t feel the connection leave the company and so on. There is lots of research done on how much money is wasted by corporates when there is miscommunication.
Not just corporates, even individuals might lose out on precious relations built over time if the quality of communication deteriorates, which is bound to happen if the NVC bit is missing. Your stress and emotions might not be read or understood by loved ones, and this can cause long term health and happiness issues.
HOW WE CAN HELP
Simply Body Talk has been working with senior leaders over the years, equipping them with the right toolset of self assessment, analysis, practice and scenario preparation so that they are ready for any situation that comes their way. While no matter of preparation can guarantee how a leader would be able to handle themselves in the moment of criticality, preparing vigorously for the same does help to think on the feet and be the leader that you would have been entrusted to be, by your people.
Explore about how we can work with you to sharpen your leadership skills or to understand your organisation’s structure and help you to plan and improve work productivity and improve the overall efficiency from top down. Inquire with us on +91 9930941534
