Email and intimacy

I lead a fair size team at work and have always been very proud of my reputation as a good manager. So when I got the results of the latest employee attitude survey a couple of weeks ago I was deeply concerned that the results had deteriorated quite sharply. Was this a sign that my management skills are in decline? Not sure. Certainly hope not.

After discussion with some colleagues my conclusion is that this is not a reflection on me, but on the more general environment. And also the arrival of several people who came to me as part of a protracted reorganisation, from teams which had experienced a period of uncertainty.

Having said all that, whatever the reason for the feelings amongst team members, it is clear something needs to be done. One thing quite noticeable is that, as a flexible and distributed team, we have lost the feeling of intimacy that we used to have and that the sheer size of the team might work against this. Is this a natural part of the maturity path of a flexible working team? Or is it an indication that a flexible team has an optimum size and that we’ve got too big? Possibly. However, it has been pointed out to me (thanks Diane) that the way we use some of the tools is also not helping. In particular email.

We’re very dependent upon email. And it’s a great tool. It allows us to communicate with many people at the same time, and is asynchronous – we don’t need to be in the same geographic space, or time space, for it to work. However, it is very impersonal, tone of voice can be very hard to get right – particularly for a group of people who come from different backgrounds – and can often be used without any real thought to the alternatives. So from now on whenever I need to get a message to just one person, I’m going to pick up the telephone and only use email rarely. That'll be much more intimate.

I’ll let you know how it goes.