hightext

Sensible e-mail

Sensible advice from Wired on writing e-mails which strikes me as universal and not culturally specific (hat tip to Pootergeek).

A parcel with nothing inside

Lucy Kellaway discussing the US bestseller Send by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe in the Financial Times displays British values of wanting a degree of formality and personalised context rather than brusque informality.

On the question of writing style, some of their strict rules coincide with my own prejudices, but I still disapprove on the grounds that e-mails should be allowed to be as different as the people who send them. They favour messages that begin with "Dear -" as do I.

Here are some beginnings I like less, arranged in a crescendo of tastelessness: Hello, Hi, Hallo, Hullo, Hey, Hiya, Hey There. Someone who begins an e-mail "Hey There" is telling me something useful: I am not likely to get on with this person.

Much of the style that the authors like, I hate. They like exclamation marks, which I reject as they make one seem like either a teenager or a Tom Peters wannabe. They approve of messages written in the subject line, with EOM (end of message) after them. I don't. Getting these e-mails is like getting a parcel with nothing inside.

I have about the same hierarchy of preference for e-mail beginnings, and I preferred to be addressed as Ms Rudlin or Pernille Rudlin by anyone who doesn't know me but I know from asking American participants in my training that they find "Dear Ms... " too formal, almost worryingly distant, for e-mails. I would be interested to know other people's preferences, so please let me know by e-mailing me what your preference is (and your nationality/cultural background).
Contact details can be found on the Rudlin Consulting pages.

Blackberry split

According to a survey by ACNielsen and VNU, British companies are much keener on BlackBerries than even American corporations. 21% of companies who do not alrady use BlackBerries for mobile e-mail are intending to introduce them in the next year. In the US, just 11% intend to do so and only 5% of French companies plan to adopt the device. A consultant at Deloitte says his impression is that there is far less 'BlackBerry praying' (furtive e-mail checking) done by continental Europeans in meetings than by the Brits. But one French banker defends his/her BlackBerry for very French reasons - it improves his/her worklife balance - "I can leave because I can be connected."

Percentage of non-users who intend to use BlackBerries in the next year: Spain 17%, Germany 9%, Italy 5%, Belgium 9%, Netherlands 6%.

I wonder why Spain is also quite high...
These statistics do not fit the monochronic/polychronic categories, nor can it be explained as an industry phenomenon - IT and banking would be particularly prone to BlackBerrying, I would guess, but I don't think Spain has a high density of bankers and IT people.

British electronic etiquette

Telewest commissioned a survey of 1,468 UK office workers on etiquette for electronic communications. The responses on some questions were surprising, but I wonder if this is due to the focus perhaps being on using e-mail, Instant Messaging (IM) etc within the office to communicate with colleagues, rather than communicating externally. I get the impression that Telewest are trying to use this survey to push IM. For example, 44% consider it rude if they have not had a reply to an e-mail within the morning, and 5% thinking it rude if they haven't received a response within 5 minutes. Telewest concludes that this means many employees are using e-mail like IM, and it would be more effective therefore to have IM. But when I suggest to participants in my training sessions that when communicating with Japan, they should adopt the policy of responding within 24 hours to e-mails, many look horrified, so I don't think people expect instant responses to external communications and although I was asked if I thought it would be OK, I haven't so far been promoting the use of IM for communicating with Japanese colleagues.

61% of respondents say they consider a person's seniority before sending an e-mail, changing their language accordingly, proportionately more than do for SMS or IM. This may be due to the unfamiliarity or still early stage of take up for SMS and IM, although I was surprised that as many as 49% have IM at work.

35% of 16-24 year olds and 25% of 25-34 year olds felt it necessary to include icons in their digital communications, compared to a national average of 18% and just 9% of 55-64 year olds. I suppose this is due to the insecurity of younger people, less experienced in communicating remotely and worried that they will be misinterpreted? I usually explain that young Japanese people use a lot of emoticons because of Japan being a high context culture, and e-mails being too low context for comfort, without emoticons. But I get the impression that emoticons are not used in Japanese workplace communications.

Hat tip to 160 Characters

Cultural software

QE Tech, a company based in Japan, founded by a Swedish-American called Nils Plett, was featured in an article in the Japan Times in February this year (alas, does not seem to be in their archive any more).

QE Tech has developed software that assists users in creating English communication based on cultural logic and phrases that readers will understand. Nils Plett says Western thought tends to be more linear. "It has a direction. When we speak, we think about the listener and choose words they will understand. We say 'I follow you' or 'I see where you are going/heading' to signal we are listening, all of which depict motion. The Japanese language, on the other hand, tends to be more image-orientated. Kanji are a good example. Because their cues are more visual, Japanese people will say, 'I can't see what you are talking about.'"

I often draw a few kanji, for tree, woods, forests, rivers, mountains, woman + child = 'like' etc to illustrate this point in my training.

Using email to overcome intercultural miscommunication

In a 2004 paper by Pnina Shachaf of Indiana University, there is a useful review of some of the literature on intercultural aspects of email but I think some highly contentious conclusions based on her own research.

Email and emotion

Satinder Gill, who was then working in Japan at the NTT Basic Research Labs, and is now at the University of Middlesex gave a paper (pdf link) at the University of Sydney conference on Cultural Attitudes towards Communication and Technology in 1998. Yes, a bit old, and I've been meaning to blog it for months. Ah well.

She asserts that discussions of communication by email and videoconferencing assume a universality of culture because the non-English speaking cultures are making all the adjustments (eg addressing others and allowing themselves to be addressed by first name) and the English speaking cultures don't notice this.

The hypotheses of her research is that for Japan the perception of e-mail is that it is easier for conflicts to emerge and that face to face communication is valued much more and that in the UK, email is perceived as a functional communication media. There is a tendency to demarcate and separate functional communication from face to face, and that flaming also arises.

She finds that Japanese do indeed consider email to be insufficient, and try to meet off line - called 'ofumi' apparently. Also that they use a greater number of emoticons ( a point I often make in my training). They do find it useful for functional matters and some like the fact that it allows for greater equality of status and allowances do not have to be made for someone else's situation.

Female Japanese found email useful for keeping an appropriate distance, and found men to be less masculine via e-mail. Email is seen as impolite compared to a letter.

The British said they did not have any difficulties, but there was a variety of experiences with some saying that it was difficult to handle negativity via email and that they never communicate by email with people whom they do not already know. Only one spoke about considering the other person's situation.

Stereotypes and e-mail

Following on from my above confession that I prefer e-mail to telephone for communication, I will now adminster a reminder to myself not to depend too much on e-mail.

An article in Wired talks about the recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which shows that we only have a no better than random chance of working out whether an e-mail is sarcastic or sincere. Those who sent the messages thought their partners would correctly interpret the tone 80% of the time and the recipients thought they accurately interpreted the tone of the messages 90% of the time. The reason behind this gap between perception and reality is egocentrism, or the difficulty some people have in detaching themselves from their own perspective. Another article on this research can be found here.

The same researchers also wrote another article looked at how stereotypes (regarding intelligence or shyness for example) persevere when using e-mail.

I was going to say that all this should make one doubly cautious if there are cultural differences as well. But actually most people working in a multinational context are probably more aware that they need to avoid sarcasm and stereotyping then they do with people from the same culture as them.

Hat tip to pootergeek.

Needing control

Blog backlog 3. More from the Financial Times mobility issue of November 12 2005.

The final article in the mobility issue was about people who choose to cut themselves off from e-mail or not to have a mobile phone. It focuses on Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, who now routes e-mail through his assistant and Jonathan Liebenau, a senior lecturer in Information Systems, who chooses not to have a mobile phone and asks students and colleagues to e-mail him instead. As the writer says, it is about which particular dragon you wish to control.

It also seems to me about how people view and manage their networks. Sen stopped trying to deal with his e-mail because of the overwhelming number that came in after he won the Nobel Prize. Liebenau feels e-mail is better than people asking quick casual questions face to face, because such questions are better articulated in written form and better dealt with by him as an e-mail response. I suspect that Sen is far more relationship focused than Liebenau, and felt panicked by the volume of e-mails because of the number of relationships that might potentially need nurturing that it represented. Liebenau is far more task focused, and presumably is not going to waste time in e-mails building a relationship.

Personally I (secretly I hope) react badly to calls coming in via mobile phone or work phone, feeling it is an intrusion of my privacy or flow of work. I use e-mail all the time though, both to build relationships and to get task related questions dealt with. Having said that, I often use the phone to talk to customers because I think I get better idea of what their true reaction or wants are and also to talk to colleagues in more relationship oriented countries like Spain or Italy.

Intercultural netiquette

Advanced Micro Devices commissioned a survey from Benchmark Research in September of this year to back their belief that the centre of our digital home is the PC, not the mobile phone or hand held organizer. I can't find the original survey but a summary of the results is given by an article in the International Herald Tribune and also The Inquirer.

The respondents were over 500 home PC users from Sweden, Germany, France, the UK and Italy.

When asked which digital device they would most willingly give up, only 1 percent said they would give up their PC, and most opted to chuck their personal digital assistants out , although the British were the most reluctant to bin their PDAs (not this Brit. Biggest waste of 300 quid I ever spent). Landline phones were also high on the list of least wanted, with the Germans being most attached to their landlines. The French and Italians valued their digital music players, the Italians and Swedes their mobile phones and the French and Italians most wanted to keep their digital cameras. So the British are the road warriors, the Germans the homebodies and the Italians and French living up to their artistic stereotype?

The Italian respondents were the most likely to be offended by people sending large or badly formatted files according to the International Herald Tribune interpretation (The Inquirer read the research as being about badly formatted e-mails) and were the most eager for help with digital etiquette (82% saying they would appreciate it, compared to the average of 56%). The French were the most concerned about how they were perceived every time they send something, and the Germans and Swedes the least concerned. So the high context cultures (French and Italian) worry about the hidden messages in the way that electronic communications look whereas the low context German and Swedes don't see any hidden messages, and believe that what counts are the words themselves, however badly formatted or presented.

More confirmation of cultural stereotypes: The French don't like the fact people can get hold of them more easily (high power distance) while Brits and Swedes complain most about the time they waste waiting for the computer to do what it's told (so are the most monochronic).

Time and IT

An amusing article from the San Jose Mercury on a survey which shows how electronic communication is making us all polychronic. Even the boss of the company who conducted the survey interrupted his own meeting with the journalist to answer a call from his mother. Reminds me of a previous posting of mine.

Hat tip to Techdirt News.

Virtual teams

One piece of advice from an article in the Financial Times supplement on Business and Diversity from May 12 (subscription only, so no link) that I have been mulling over:

"Any good virtual team has a communication plan that includes weekly conference calls or e-mail check-ins, but with a virtual team where not everyone speaks English well, the regular report-ins should be in written mode rather than by telephone or conference call." Joanne Yates, a professor of management at MIT Sloan.

I've often tried to point out in my seminars that I think teleconferencing or videoconferencing is not a very effective way to communicate with Japanese colleagues but I have never gone so far as to suggest that report-ins should only be done by e-mail. Teleconferencing seems to be a fact of life in American multinationals, and Japanese people working in them have a resigned attitude to such communication mechanisms - it comes with the territory and they chose to work for an American multinational.

A director at a UK company I have been talking to recently says he communicates with his Japanese subordinate once a week by telephone in order to get updates from him. He says the Japanese person's English is 'OK' (which, given the tone of voice he said this in, I take it as British speak for not very good). I can't imagine him being happy me with me suggesting that he asks his Japanese subordinate to report in by e-mail each week instead. I have a gut feeling that British managers feel it is important to have a dialogue or at least the pretence of a dialogue with subordinates to feel that real communication has occurred. If I get the chance, I will talk to the Japanese subordinate about how he views these calls.

Prof Yates has a nice anecdote at the end of the article about an online conference between a group of US and Japanese executives working in the R&D unit of a Japanese company.

'A Japanese executive was putting text into a window for instant messaging when one of the Americans started asking questions in the middle of the presentation...that was not culturally familiar and required an instant response, which caused real problems. So [virtual communications] have a cultural element as well.'

Well quite.

Liar liar phone on fire

Apparently we (read: Americans) are more likely to lie face to face or on the phone than when we use e-mail, according to research about to be published in the New Scientist.

The Cornell University researcher who conducted the study reckons it's to do with whether the conversation is immediate and whether it is recorded. It seems to me it also depends on how you define lying. Certainly barefaced lies would be more likely when the person is caught unprepared in a conversation. You can prepare very carefully for a lie in an e-mail - it can be less of a lie than being "economical with the actualite" as the late British government minister Alan Clarke once put it - copying British civil servant Sir Robert Armstrong's "it contains a misleading impression, not a lie. It was being economical with the truth", said during the Spycatcher case.

Sir Robin Butler (also a British civil servant) claims that he and Sir Robert were merely paraphrasing Edmund Burke (18th century Irish statesman and philosopher) - who according to Sir Robin said "be economical with the truth that you may speak it the longer". The nearest Burke excerpts I can find to this on the web are here - "a wise man will speak the truth with temperance that he may speak it the longer." (which is second hand) and here: "I will not enter into the question how much truth is preferable to peace. Perhaps truth may be far better. But as we have scarcely ever the same certainty in the one that we have in the other I would, unless the truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in her company charity, the highest of the virtues."

Gosh, we Brits (which in this case includes 18th century Irish) have a long tradition of finding virtuous reasons for sort-of-lying, it would seem. And let us not forget Shakespeare, in Henry IV, Part One. Falstaff: 'The better part of valour is discretion; in the which better part I have saved my life.'

Getting by, not getting on

I've finally read the whole of the latest UK think tank The Work Foundation's iSociety report, "Getting by, not getting on: Technology in UK workplaces". I can't say it told me anything I didn't already know, but it's good to have some impressions confirmed by research. (The report is 92 pages long and has to be printed at normal quality to be legible, using a lot of colour ink, so it may be worth spending the GBP10.00 to get a hard copy.)

There's no particular cross cultural angle to the report as it focuses more or less entirely on the UK. It does, however, examine why there were lower returns to investment in IT in the UK compared to the US in terms of productivity over the past few years, suggesting that is due to UK investment in IT having happened later than in the US, so the benefits have not been fully realised yet. It also talks about the network effect, that there are simply not enough uses for IT for companies in particular sectors (law was highlighted) for there to be an industry pressure to adopt and benefit from various IT tools.

These may be the main reasons, but I also wonder whether it isn't because US corporate cultures tend to be much more project focused ("Guided Missile" as Trompenaars/Hampden Turner put it) so employees will happily take up new IT if it helps get the job done. UK companies on the other hand fall into the "Incubator" type, where self fulfilment and respect from others are the motivating forces for the employees, so if IT tools seem to be undermining their job satisfaction and status, they are likely to resist.

Other points I highlighted were:

- a study of a Californian hi-tech research firm which showed that there were three broad emailing styles corresponding to different positions in the firm, even though very little formal hierarchy existed. Senior staff tended to send short, terse messages, often with poor spelling and grammar. This could be an indication of a busy and important job, but also a way of expressing it.
Lab workers mostly sent joke mails round friends. Middle managers tended to send long, jargon rich messages, often providing over-complex answers to simple questions. They were also most likely to use the 'cc' line. Ah, brings back memories!

- a lack of formal IT training in the companies studied, which meant that it was important to have informal learning available, from colleagues or in the case of the consulting company studied, from designated technology champions.

- how useless most companies are at implementing the change management that goes with introducing new technology. They tended to go for a top-down approach, with little consultation or understanding of the organisation and its various local components. And problems were most extreme when change was driven by IT executives or implemented solely by IT staff. Apparently IT recruitment consultants are therefore stressing the importance of IT staff being good communicators. Oxymoron?

- the report also suggests that outsourcing the IT function or having the IT function in a separate location breeds "ignorance and at worst, contempt" - both ways. (I take back that oxymoron comment then)

- finally the report summarises its findings in three myths - the myth of integration (that a vast range of the organisation's resources can be integrated using IT), the myth of control (that IT will allow managers easy control over staff) and the myth of solutions (the vendor claim that IT will provide a complete unifying solution to various management problems).

Face letters

I've been meaning to post about the Japanese use of emoticons (called kaomoji in Japanese = face letters) - mostly in e-mails. They use them far more than we do in the UK and I suspect the rest of Europe and North America. One that particularly caught my eye was this:

m(_\\_)m

I think it's supposed to represent a balding man (just two strands of hair) bowing on his knees (the context was a grovelling apology), head to the ground, with the m's representing his hands.

Now I've found a whole website devoted to them. You can get smiling faces here, sweating faces here (to denote embarrassment or effort), crying faces here, gesturing (yawns, bows) here, expressive faces here (pain, winking etc) and miscellaneous (mostly animals) here.

It's a wonderful example of how a high context culture tries to find ways to communicate body language and feelings in a low context medium.

We're all multitaskers now

I've often wondered if e-mail is making monochronic cultures more polychronic. People from monochronic cultures (USA, Switzerland, Germany and Scandinavia) see time in a linear way and like to focus on one job at a time in a highly concentrated way. Always-on e-mail is therefore anathema to this, as it interrupts their work with irrelevant demands. People from polychronic cultures (France, Latin America, Arab countries) presumably treat e-mail as just one of the many tasks they are juggling at once, not minding the distraction, happy to look at e-mails, talk on the phone and write a report all at once. Although I have Scandinavian roots I'm polychronic when it comes to work - I sometimes have so many windows open on my computer that I used to crash it (before I got XP!)

It seems that American business school students are becoming much more polychronic in the way they behave in the classroom, e-mailing and surfing the web while participating in discussions. Some faculty are happy with this, presumably if they feel comfortable that the e-mailing and surfing are all related to the topic in hand. But remembering the whispered comments that used to ripple across the room at my business school, I bet half the e-mails and surfing are tangential at best to the topic in hand... This article is mostly a plug for a book, but I like the anecdote about the author being surprised at the way his 10 year old daughter was able to incorporate instant messaging, watching TV and talking on the phone into getting her homework done. This shift in work habits has been going on for a while though - I remember my parents being totally unconvinced that I could do my homework and listen to music at the same time. Now I actually need music to work!