I was wrong about the office communication etiquettes. I guess!
Lately, I have been encountering a lot of articles that suggest getting straight to the point when initiating a chat with a coworker.
For example:
You: Hi, what do to think about XYZ?Co-worker: To be honest, I ...
Instead of:
You: HiCo-worker: Hey** you articulating your thoughts ****co-worker is staring blankly that your chat window**You (after a while): I have a question
I have always been a proponent of the later approach since the beginning of my career. I always preferred greeting the person first than to immediately getting to the point. As the later approach looked so robotic to me. No empathy or care towards the person you are talking to. You just want your answers right away. This never fit well with me. To me, it was like de-humanizing the entire process of communication.
In retrospect, I can attribute this way of thinking to calling people “resources” at your company. At the very start of my career, I joined a multinational firm where people were called resources. I abhorred this notion of referring to the employees of your company as resources. It sounds like they are just cogs in your gargantuan machine. They are the expandables.
Hence, I always tried to introduce some empathy back into my chat conversations by asking questions like “Hi, “How are you” and then proceeding to actual question.
As I am reading more and more about this whole “get straight to the point” thing and starting to incorporate it my professional chat conversations, I am starting to like it. I appreciate when my co-workers get straight to point. So I guess my co-workers appreciate it too.
One more factor, that I think contributes towards why I am not feeling bad about this approach nowadays is that we don’t call people “resources” here. So, at the back of my mind I have the clarity that I am still talking to a human and the other person is also not considering me a resource but a human.
So, getting straight to the point is the way to go.
Thank you for reading my thoughts. Please do come back for more reflections.
