Two guides have been published recently on business communications etiquette. The Microsoft/Finishing Academy one does have some cross cultural awareness, specifying that Europeans are more formal, so emoticons should be avoided. The Forbes one is very instant messaging focused, which leads me to believe it is very US focused too.
A survey by 160 Characters of British users of IM, SMS, e-mail etc reveals more or less what one would predict, but also shows that Instant Messaging is becoming more prevalent in business - with 73% using IM for business reasons. Last week I asked a group of Americans based in the US about IM, and all used it, including for communicating remotely with Chinese engineers. I suspect Japan is still resistant though. Also, I think there is an industry specific tendency, with electronic gadget/telcoms related people far more likely to use IM and mobile messaging/e-mail.
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
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.
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.
An article (pdf link) by Setlock, Fussell and Neuwirth of the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on research done into decision making via instant messaging between Americans and Chinese raises the question of how we should assess 'efficient' decision making.
They set 24 pairs of three different cultural groupings (American to American, American to Chinese and Chinese to Chinese) one of those decision making tasks involving survival and what you would take with you, that you get on management training courses. The twist was that some pairs had to resolve the task via instant messaging.
They measured the efficiency of the decision making process in terms of time taken and numbers of words and speaking turns used. They expected the American to American pairs to be most efficient which indeed they were, but were surprised to find that the Chinese to Chinese pairs were most 'inefficient' even compared to American to Chinese pairs, where they were expecting cultural barriers to cause problems.
They found that instant messaging reduced but did not eliminate the effects of culture on conversational efficiency and content. By content they meant the amount of hedging or politeness used. Also, they suggest that it is the synchronicity of Instant Messaging that supports remote work amongst high context cultures like China rather than its richness.
Their conclusion is that the American to American participants viewed the task as an exercise in situation specific compromise, trying to find a mutually acceptable join rating form, whereas the Chinese to Chinese pairs tried to reach a real agreement, through consensus on the relative worth of the survival items they chose. This may have taken more time, but in terms of how persuaded by each other, and how 'happy' with the process they were, it seems to me the Chinese to Chinese pairs were more effective.