What Did You Say?
The lost art of speech in the workplace
My grandson is just shy of 18 months. He’s been walking for six months, constantly testing his physical boundaries. So many new things to see, touch, smell. So many stories to tell about his daily adventures.
Photo © Joy Ryder 2022
He’s also still in the early stages of vocal communications. No words yet, just conversations in baby babble, complete with intonations, facial expressions, and even hand gestures. For the most part, his parents understand what he’s trying to say. But there are also occasions where they do not and that will manifest itself in tears, tantrums, and high levels of frustration all round.
It’s a reminder to me of the value of speech. When we speak, we are communicating more than words. It’s also the volume and frequency we use and the pace at which we speak. Some of it is very subtle, but our brains are trained to pick up these nuances. We instinctively know if someone is mad at us or if they are having a good day.
Why is this important to the workplace? Because we have displaced most voice communications with text missives. Email, texting, and social media have become the default methods of communication. So much so, that workers in an office who may be sitting only a few yards from a colleague will send text-based messages rather than having a quick conversation.
Text-based communication may be efficient, but it often doesn’t convey the sender’s intention. Are they being serious, or joking around? Do they really mean this, or are they using sarcasm? Confusion around the sender’s intention creates tension and leads to unnecessary conflict.
Here are five reasons why I see a renaissance in the use of voice communications in the workplace:
It can improve productivity. We can speak faster than we can type. We also make less spelling and grammatical errors when speech-to-text (STT) software is used to transcribe the message. STT technology has advanced significantly in the past few years and it will get even better the more it is being used.
It will reduce worker frustrations and give them less reason to leave. Giving workers an easier way to have open, honest conversations reduces misunderstandings, increases respect, and improves morale. This is possible with new voice-native communications platforms which allow message recording and retrieval from virtually any device 24/7.
It will better connect employees with management. Broadcast emails or printed newsletters are not nearly as effective as personal voice messages from company leaders. Until now, that’s been difficult to scale. But we recently developed ways to broadcast personal messages to hundreds of employees at once and allow each employee to respond immediately. This is going to allow management to receive much quicker feedback from a large group of employees and, in turn, allow better decision making on personnel policy changes or other business changes.
It will make it easier to weed out the bad candidates in the hiring process. Using a written resume for pre-qualification is not as effective as an in-person interview. But that’s not feasible in large organizations hiring many at once. Tech is coming to the rescue with AI/ML-driven tools for analyzing voice data collected from job applicants. These tools can be trained to pick out the people you definitely don’t want to hire.
We need safer ways to communicate while driving. Employees increasingly need to communicate while driving, particularly mobile workers such as truck drivers, service techs, and last-mile or ride-share drivers. Texting or scrolling on phones while at the wheel has become an epidemic and is now one of the leading causes of accidents. We can change that with more voice native applications on phones which allow drivers to send and receive information without even looking down at their devices.
Ask me if you’re interested in experimenting with these new voice tools in your workplace: dryder@ten5.app
.