Stop emailing. Start talking again.

“Where do we stand on this project?”

“I wrote an email asking about the status, waiting to hear back from the team”.

Aw. How I hate that response. Whenever I hear it — and I hear it quite often, unfortunately — I understand why things don’t move any quicker.

If you think the issue applies only to large corporations, I’m sorry to prove you wrong. I am the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a 25-person B2B SaaS company, and we’re struggling with that email issue, too.

Replacing that letter

Email is a great tool to handle everything that was handled with letters in the past: invoices, meeting invitations, document transfers, monthly reports, mass communications, etc.

However, do you think innovation and business were handled by letters in the past?

I don’t think so. People met, and here is the first good reason: Neither a letter nor an email is interactive. Emails are misunderstood because they are written hastily on the sender side, and read on a mobile device in a hurry or whilst doing other things on the receiver side. The sender and receiver don’t see the rise of the other person’s eyebrows or the puzzled look on their faces.

So, what do you do with an email that you don’t fully understand? You let it sink lower in your inbox, disappearing in the flood of other emails. At the same time, the sender is waiting for your answer — which will never come.

The second good reason to meet or talk instead of communicating over email is the fact that everybody receives too many emails, but nobody can be in two conversations simultaneously (even if some people think they can double-book their calendars, but that’s another story).

Talking doesn’t need to be face-to-face only

I hear the criticism already: haven’t you noticed that the world has changed, with the majority of people working on their laptops from their homes?

Of course, I have. I’ve been doing this for the last couple of years myself, too.

However, I have spent hundreds of hours in Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Webex meetings, the majority of which with cameras on. In such a setting, business and project work can be managed very efficiently as contrasted to trying to do it over email only. During the pandemic, we onboarded large customers completely through online meetings — whilst certainly not ideal, it worked, and it would never have worked by email only.

The same thing was true for product demos, contract negotiations, and other business-related activities.

However, there are two activities for which I would always prefer face-to-face meetings:

• Establishing personal relationships and building the trust that is required for a long-term collaboration. Whenever we have new employees, we make sure that the teammates are physically in the office regularly during the first few weeks. In this way, all the small things in between the formal touch points are addressed way better than by hopping from online meetings to online meetings. 
For our remote colleagues, onboarding happens through online meetings of course, but each new colleague gets assigned a mentor to reach out to for all the informal things. Furthermore, we assemble the whole team three times yearly in a “Swiss week” in our headquarters in Zurich — just to establish and deepen personal relationships.

•  Starting innovative projects. Innovation seldom is a product of a structured meeting but sparks spontaneously in real-life situations. When around other people, that spark can excite other people and weave the cotton of an unfolding innovation. But just because innovation sparks spontaneously, you can’t invite people to an “innovation workshop” and request innovation on demand. There is no other way than to hang out and talk to people regularly — even if you leave the office, bar, or dinner table without a major innovation.

Day-to-day with your customers: the good old telephone

Most day-to-day communications aren’t about establishing new personal relationships or starting innovative projects, but about maintaining personal relationships and driving business and project work.

My tool of choice for such work is the good old telephone instead of email. Everyone on my team has heard this sentence from me: pick up the phone and call the person.

I know people roll their eyes when I say it. I know it’s harder to try calling somebody multiple times rather than firing off one single email. But I also know that it is more effective than firing off that email. And that’s why I ask people to pick up the phone.

Day-to-day with your teammates: Slack

As usual, the world isn’t black or white. There is a hybrid between email and phone, at least for internal communications: Slack. It allows people to type a message to launch a conversation, and when things are getting too complicated for ill-spelled messages, the “huddle” button launches an online meeting. From email to talking, within a split-second.

This article is also published on the author's blog. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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