Written communication is remote work super power

Probably over half of the communications problems I've seen at work are because people don't follow this basic practice. They respond based on what they understood, not based on what the speaker was saying.

As one book I read put it: You should be able to reflect their world view back to them as if you yourself are advocating for it (even if you completely disagree). When you do this, they'll believe you understand them. For many people, only then will they listen to your critiques.

When uncertainty is high, and an intense discussion is needed, spoken word is much more efficient, from my experience. People are fundamentally better at speaking quickly and taking proper turns. This all is much slower and more cumbersome in video call, phone call, or a text chat. The perceived sequence breaks, the turn-taking protocol breaks (unless enforced by a moderator, at the expense of speed), and the communication become slower, less efficient, and more tiresome.

I love neatly written logically organized texts. But to produce such a text, a lot of the questions it answers should be already understood, answered, and arranged in a easy-to-consume order. There are situations when this is not possible, and finding out the scope of the problem and its structure is exactly the task. Here's where face-to-face verbal communication rules.

Of course, providing some written output after such a meeting is important, too, be it nicely written minutiae (a shared document on a large screen works well), or just a photo of the whiteboard.

So, both written and face-to-face types of communication are important. None can efficiently replace the other.

Except there are barriers: People can tell you immediately that they don't understand you before you go off and speak for too long. Whereas with asynchronous, you could write a large amount and people won't be able to comprehend it because you made a mistake early on.

> I think async writing is much better (obviously nothing's perfect) for removing emotions from the discussion and forcing people to spend time thinking through their thoughts.

I agree on the latter, and disagree on the former. Rarely have I seen an important decision being discussed async that is devoid of emotion. With async, emotions are harder to gauge. This does not lead to people giving others the benefit of the doubt. It more often leads to people misreading emotions.

> And CC (+BCC) is, imo, the greatest business tool being dropped nowadays in favor of synchronous comms. CC keeps people informed without wasting time or disrupting schedules. It also allows the bosses to keep a much better handle on the comms culture of the company, since they obviously cannot sit in on or observe every meeting.

"You know how many emails I get every day? Do you think I have time to read every email I get?" spoken by every manager/senior engineer in my company.

(Although I'll admit, I prefer email to all other async comms I've seen. Pseudo-IM stuff is the worst).

There are, for sure, problems with both forms of communications. Conducting good "live" discussions in a room is a skill, and most of the participants have to be proficient at it. The same will go for async communications.

I think if there are serious, technical/tough issues to discuss, it is best to have it written up, with proper "counter" documents, and then get into a room to make the final decision, with everyone already well informed. It's a rare workplace where that will happen. People will respond to something well written with a one line objection on one minor aspect of the proposal, etc.

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Lets say there are three main steps in responding to communication: 1. Comprehension of the original communication. 2. Mapping that communication onto the reader's priors. 3. Crafting a response that communicates the results of that mapping.

The problem seems to be that the first two steps are typically left implicit indefinitely. As a result, there can be discontinuities lurking hidden in or between any of those three steps and it's a hell of a lot of work to pry those discontinuities up to the surface.

Self consciousness is an interesting problem. I prefer seeing faces on the screen during the stand-up (such as it is in the days of COVID), but I was told many hesitate to be on camera.

Did you ever find a way out of this? Join.me has very small video size, I imagine this is one way to lessen the stress. Alas it doesn't work for me - I need to see the facial expressions because I need to know when I lost the audience, and because I find it hard to pay attention to a disembodied (and heavily compressed) voice.