You’re working from home things are going swimmingly. Today is busy, but you can handle
busy. Then, suddenly, your computer starts spazzing.
This is stressful because you are working on a time-sensitive deliverable. You had everything
on track but now you don’t. Meanwhile, you get a text from your boss saying
she needs you to put everything on pause and help with a separate project.
And as if things couldn’t get any worse, a colleague is now calling you about who knows
what. Can’t they see you are swamped and feeling
overwhelmed? Well, no, actually. They can’t.
The fact that they can’t highlights one of the greatest drawbacks to remote work:
when you aren’t in an office with someone, it is much harder to gauge their mental state
and emotional status. This deficiency can lead to a slew of complications,
including the one we just illustrated. Today we are going to discuss how we can overcome
this in-person deficiency and become more effective at long-distance empathy.
If you’re managing remote teams, collaborating remotely, or simply care about the wellbeing
of colleagues who aren’t in the office with you, then stick around.
What’s up Explearners. Mary Daphne here of explearning.co where we believe social
skills are the key to the Good Life. What’s the Good Life? It’s where you call the shots,
you have a crew you can count on, and you’re on a mission you care about.
Before I jump in, I wanted to tell you about a great free resource we’ve created for
the Explearning community. It’s a comprehensive small talk guide. If you find yourself grasping
at thin air when you’re in unfamiliar social situations, then our small talk guide is for
you! Click the link in the description box below to get the downloadable delivered to
your inbox. Back to the lesson.
Remote work is becoming increasingly commonplace, and while it comes with many advantages, one
of the major drawbacks of remote work is the inherent difficulty in reading the emotional
state of our colleagues and clients. When we are interacting with people in-person,
we can read their body language and facial expressions. Coupled with their tone of voice
and posture, we get over 93% of the information we need to understand how they are feeling.
The remaining 7% is their words. These numbers were not pulled from thin air,
by the way. They come from an in-depth study by Professor Albert Mehrabian on the complex
dynamics of in-person communication. So the challenge when working remotely is
to overcome the fact that, whenever we send an email or text, 93% of the information we
subconsciously communicate in-person is excluded. And it actually goes beyond that. When we’ve
recently interacted with someone, their image is fresh in our minds. Research shows that
we are more likely to treat those people kindly. Of course, the opposite also applies – when
we haven’t recently interacted with someone, their image in our minds has faded, and we
view them as less familiar to us, and thus we are less likely to behave favorably toward
them. So how do we handle this?
There are a number of strategies we can deploy. In this lesson we’ll discuss two.
The first strategy is pretty straight forward: whenever possible, take the opportunity to
engage with people through video chat or by phone.
Now this is not to say that you shouldn’t also communicate by email or Slack. Those
are excellent mediums for conveying detailed instructions and creating an informative paper
trail. But if you’re sending out an important email, follow it up with a call to see if
the recipient had any questions. Or if you are assigning something to someone whom you
haven’t seen in a while, see if they are available for a Zoom call to go through the
specifics in person. During those calls, there is no magic to what
you say. Simply hearing their voice, and them hearing yours, and if it’s a video chat,
seeing each other’s faces, will do wonders for reinforcing the sense of understanding
and camaraderie between you. And if you stray into a little small talk, let it happen! That’s
part of what makes us human, so savor it. The second strategy is to dial up your empathy
meter to 11. This goes for when you are making those voice
and video calls, but it also applies to your written communications.
If you sense even the slightest bit of frustration or anxiety when interacting with someone,
don’t ignore it. Explore it. See if you can get to the bottom of it. Maybe the person
is feeling overwhelmed because they have too much on their plate. Maybe something stressful
is going on at home. Either way, by identifying these signs of distress, you can act accordingly
by assigning a task to someone else or offering to lend a helping hand.
Now when you are operating with this heightened sensitivity, it’s possible that you will
run into false positives. For example, what you detected as frustration might instead
be simply the result of rushed writing. That’s why it is important to not make assumptions.
Probe the situation and get the information you need to know how they are feeling, one
way or another. ---
So there you have it, two powerful ways to integrate empathy into your remote collaboration.
Let’s quickly recap: - Email, texting, and other forms of written
communication inherently lack empathy - We treat people better when their image
is fresh in our heads - You can refresh that image with a short
voice or video call - Be on high alert for signs of distress when
interacting with your colleagues and address the issue as soon as you encounter it
By embracing a more empathetic style of remote collaboration, you lay a foundation for happier
and more productive teams. When we know more about how our teammates are feeling, workloads
are better balanced, and moral is higher. And as is the case with most of our strategies
for remote work, these methods are equally effective when you are in the same office!
Empathetic communication is a surefire way to improve the quality of your professional
interactions and build stronger bonds with the people you work with.
So the next time you’re working from home, don’t be afraid to put a little more feeling
into it 😊 So now that I've shared our thoughts, I’d
love to hear your own ideas for collaborating with empathy. Do you think it’s important
to know how your colleagues are feeling? Have you been in situations where empathy was lacking?
How did it make you feel? Share that with me and the Explearning community
in the comments down below. And, if you loved this lesson, please be sure
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are always available on our blog at explearning.co/blog. With that, have an awesome week, Explearners.
Thank you so much for joining me and I’ll see you next time for your next Explearning
lesson. Happy Explearning ⚡