welcome to
Dilemma
Phone or email: that's my dilemma
By Jesse Yoder
This is a short opinion piece that looks at the relative
value of communication by phone vs. communication by email from a human
perspective. First it
recounts two phone conversations, and then an email relationship. It then looks at the pros and cons of each method.
Phone call with Bill
Yesterday I called someone that I’ve known off and on
over the past ten years or so. I
was somewhat surprised that he actually answered his phone.
This is all too rare these days. I’ll call him Bill.
This was a fairly routine call. I was calling to find out if the company has any press
releases that I could use for our new Worldflow product. I needed some information on thermal flowmeters for a section
on flow technologies. “Can
you hold for a minute?” he said. I
went “OK,” and proceeded to hold for three or four minutes.
Finally Bill came back on the line.
“Can I call you back. I
have a train of people here waiting for me.
Unless you want to hold awhile longer.”
“I’ll be the caboose,” I replied.
“Call me back later.”
The caboose thing seemed to blow right past him. ”Where are you?” he said.
“Wakefield, Massachusetts,” I replied.
“So you must work late.”
“I was here till 11:00 last night.”
“OK, bye.”
“Bye.”
Bill called back the next day. Somehow the question of how long he’d been at that position
came up. “I’ve been here
21 years,” he said. Ya’ve
gotta respect that. Then we started talking about September 11.
Bill went “I flew to Germany for Interkama (a trade show) a week
after September 11. There was
nobody there.” I didn’t
bother volunteering that I spent three days and 30 hours driving from
Houston to Boston after September 11.
Bill pointed out correctly that our president said it was safe to
fly. “Sometimes you have to
put on your brass jockstrap.” The
conversation then switched to market research.
“Information means a lot.”
Bill is someone I don’t know very well.
Yet talking to him on the phone brought back a flood of memories
and associations, presumably from previous conversations.
I could tell he was in a good mood, and interacting with him lifted
my spirits too.
Phone call with Tom
Flash backward to another conversation with another person,
who I will call Tom. I’m
working with Tom to jointly develop a new product with his company.
He first sent me an email expressing interest, so I called him
back.
In our conversation, I found that, as we talked, we
together developed the idea of a product where we could each make
substantial contribution. This was an idea that was only vaguely
formulated at first. It only
emerged in the give and take of conversation, as each of us with our
different points of view elucidated our idea of what this product would
look like.
A week later, I called him back, and we had a similar
experience. We further
developed the idea over the phone. We
are now ready to move ahead.
Emails with Steve
Let’s contrast these two conversations with someone else
I mostly deal with by email. This
is someone that I’ve been working with for over three years.
I’ll call him Steve. I correspond with him almost exclusively by
email. Sometimes several months go by without a phone conversation.
Our emails mainly have to do with schedules for the flow studies,
clients who have ordered the studies, and payment-related issues.
Sometimes I feel the need to talk to him on the phone.
Why do I feel this need? It
could be because I need an immediate decision about something.
However, it’s more likely to be because I have an idea I’d like
to explore. Perhaps it’s an
issue related to writing a study, or a marketing idea.
Whatever it is, I would prefer to discuss on the phone, rather than
write an email about.
When I have this feeling, I usually call the company and
ask to talk to Steve. Ninety-nine
times out of a hundred, he’s “in a meeting,” so I leave a message.
My hope is that he will call me back.
Instead of a callback, if I get any response, I get an
email. I think there are two
reasons for this. One is that
he prefers the intellectual exercise of writing out an email to making a
telephone call. It’s a lot
less threatening, and doesn’t require any actual human interaction.
Secondly, I’m the caboose in his mind.
I’m so low on his priority list that he doesn’t even try to
contact me unless he’s cleared away all his other “important” tasks.
And apparently he has a lot of those.
This drives me up a wall.
I have the idea in my head that people should respond in the way
they were contacted. So if
someone sends you a letter, send them a letter back.
If they call you, the correct thing is to call them back.
Obviously Steve doesn’t grasp this concept.
Or, if he does, he doesn’t apply it to me.
Pros and Cons of Phones vs. Emails
The accounts of the above three conversations display a
couple of good and bad features of phones and emails. If you call someone and they’re busy or don’t want to
talk to you, they will invariably claim to be “in a meeting” and have
you leave a message. Then you
may or may not get a callback. Chances
are good you won’t.
Emails have at least four advantages:
a) You can send them and it doesn’t matter what the other
person is doing – he’ll still get the message.
Emails are also good in that you can send an email to someone and
it has minimal impact on them. It
may cause a bell to ring on their computer (you’ve got mail!), but
otherwise it doesn’t interrupt what they’re doing.
b) Emails can also be good in dealing with people from
another country, who write and read your language better than they speak
it. I have Japanese clients
that I’ve done large projects for, and we always seem to communicate
better by email.
c) Time is not an issue for emails.
You can send an email anytime during the day or night, and the
other person can be asleep when they receive it.
d) Email fosters conversations among groups of people
because it’s easy to copy people on an email.
Why I don’t like emails
With all these advantages, who’s complaining?
I recognize that emails are important, and I will probably continue
to use them, at least until they are replaced by a new and better
technology.
Still, I don’t like emails, and here’s why.
1. Ninety percent of the emails I receive are spam.
Because emails are essentially free, anyone who has access to a
computer can send them at no charge.
Imagine if it was free to mail a letter.
The resulting burden on the post office, which is already
overburdened, would be overwhelming.
What’s more, the vast majority of these emails are
computer-generated. They are
not the result of any human being trying to reach you.
They are the result of your being on a list to receive some
impersonal communication.
2. Emails take the personality out of communication.
Emails are a means of self-expression.
However, no actual interaction with another human being is required
with emails. You write the
email out, send it, and the other person reads it.
It’s as if we all walked around with tape recorders.
Instead of talking directly to another person, we talk into our
tape recorder, then give it to them to play back.
They listen to the tape, record their own reply, and give it back
to you.
3. It is possible to work out an idea over time in a
collaborative way with another person.
However, the dynamic that exists when two people are discussing a
subject isn’t there. A
phone conversation is like a tennis match, with ideas being tossed back
and forth. An email
conversation is more like a bowling match.
4. Email is a left-brain, head-oriented way of
communicating. When someone
writes an email, they are communicating from their head.
You can’t touch another person via email, and neither can you see
the expression on their face. When
you write an email, you are forced to be logical.
It is possible to express feelings via email, but they have to be
funneled through language. You
can’t smile via email. Much
of self-expression is non-verbal, and emails don’t have a category for
those things, apart from sending pictures.
But a picture is an external representation, it’s not from the
heart.
So what’s the alternative to using emails?
How about a telephone call? Or
an in-person visit. Or
whatever happened to letter writing?
Is that too old-fashioned today in our computerized world.
Of course, if all else fails, there’s always telepathy.
Personally, I’ve resolved to use the telephone a lot
more, and to only use emails when it’s absolutely necessary.
Maybe I’ll be able to have some human interaction again for a
change.
For comments, please send an email to jesse@flowresearch.com
(ha ha).