Have you ever sent an email or a text message and your tone has been completely misinterpreted. Maybe you were really brief because you were in a hurry and the person on the receiving end thought you're being a bit rude. Or perhaps you've been on the receiving end of some abrupt sounding messages and worried that the other person was angry with you. As someone who thinks a lot about efficiency, my emails can be pretty short. But it's not because
I'm not a nice person. It's just because I'm probably trying to power through my inbox and not putting enough thought into the tone of my responses. And my friends would sometimes say the same is true of my text messaging. But what if I told you there was a way of being really efficient with your email and messaging but also injecting a lot of personality or at very least the intended tone that you're going for. Well there is, and today I'm going to share this little rick with you.
My name is doctor Amantha Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, And this is how I work a show about how to help you do your best work. At my consultancy Inventium, we default to asynchronous communication. Now, if you're not familiar with this term, asynchronous communication basically means non live communication, so that might be email or instant messenger, Slack, or maybe
collaborating via Google Docs for example. And this is as opposed to defaulting to synchronous communication, which is live communication like meetings and phone calls. But sometimes when you're communicating asynchronously, it can take a long time to write a response to something via email or SMS or on Slack. And sometimes you know, I'll try to be funny or inject some human and tone can unfortunately, and jokes can unfortunately be lost or misinterpreted very easily via the written form.
And another thing is I will be quite brief in my asynchronous responses, and briefness can be interpreted as being abrupt or cold. That is not ideal because I want to come across with warmth. So how do I get that warmth across while remaining asynchronous and relatively efficient in how I communicate? Well, what I do is I rely heavily on audio messages. So an audio message is where you basically record yourself talking out your response. There are
several situations where I really lean into audio messages. So firstly, when someone on my team emails me wanting feedback on something. It might be feedback on some client work that they've done, or feedback on a problem that they're trying to solve, or on an idea that they've had, and I find it's so much more efficient to just record an audio message, and importantly, tone doesn't get lost, which is really important
when giving feedback to someone or about something. Your communication becomes so much richer because using audio communication, it's quite easy to communicate emotion just through using your voice. Now, another time I use audio messages is when a journalist
wants me to comment on a story. So probably every second or third day, I'd get a request from someone in the media wanting me to comment on a piece that they're working on, and they'll often send me through questions, and if we're not doing a phone interview or video interview or TV interview, I will often be asked to email through responses, which is actually quite time consuming because not only does it involve thinking, it involves writing and
editing my responses to make sure that they make sense in the written form. So what I now do is I de to an audio message where I'll record myself talking out the responses, and I find that to be a far more efficient way to respond and help journalists with stories and meet tight deadlines quickly. Now I also
use it in my social life. So when I've got something to say to a friend that doesn't warrant a phone call but it would be a really long SMS, I'll send an audio message, which I found to be really useful, and I think my friends find relatively novel and fun. I think, and also I even use audio
messages in my dating life. So for single listeners out there that happen to be on Bumble, Bumble has a really cool feature where you can record audio messages as your response as opposed to texting or typing out your response. And again I found it such a good way to
communicate with people. Obviously, phone in face to face is better I've been in those early early days, And when I receive audio messages back from people on the app, I find that I can in fers and really use things just by that person's audio message that I wouldn't have been able to get from just the written form. Now let's get into the nitty gritty of how this
works in practice when it comes to work communication. So for longer audio messages, let's just say someone's asked me to give feedback on an idea, I will often gather my thoughts and make some brief notes in ever note, and then when I'm recording the audio messages, I'll talk to those points just so I'm not wasting the other person's time and being a bit waftly or not getting straight to the point. But I find for shorter messages, I will generally just speak off the cuff, and I
find that that is quite adequate. Now, technology wise, I've got an iPhone, and if I'm communicating with another iPhone user, it's really easy. My iPhone just lets me hold down a little microphone icon in the messaging app, and I hold that down, I talk out my audio message, and then I hit send after I've recorded the message. But when I'm communicating to people on Android devices or I need a workaround. So what I do is I record the audio message using the Voice Memos app, and then
I share that audio recording using SMS or WhatsApp. And the other workaround is that I just communicate directly using WhatsApp now. Not surprisingly, research from the University of California found that social connectedness or bonding is stronger between friends who communicate via audio message rather than instant messenger. The research also suggested that video communication takes this up another notch if you want to get even more fancy and
record video messages. So this week, why not try sending or replying to someone via an audio message and see what kind of response it gets. I'd love to hear how you go if you are looking for more tips to improve the way that you work. I write a short fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things that I've discovered that helped me work better, which range from interesting research findings through to gadgets that I'm loving. You can
sign up for that at Howiwork dot co. That's how I Work dot Co. How I Work is produced by inventing them with production support from Dead Set Studios, and thank you to Martin Nimba who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything sound so much better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.