#37 COMMUNICATION MEDIA: Phone or Email – with HR expert Tamara Finlay

Do you know when to use the phone or email?  What about text, social media, and face-to-face meetings? How do you feel when you hear the phone ring?  In this podcast episode, HR expert Tamara Finlay shares advice and frameworks to help you choose the ideal communication media or platform to optimize your communication.

REFERENCES & LINKS

Tamara Finlay

* LinkedIn

* https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamarafinlay/

* Recommendations:

* FastCompany

* Allegra Shaw

Talk About Talk & Dr. Andrea Wojnicki

* Talk About Talk podcast episodes mentioned:

* How to Conquer your Email Inbox

* Authenticity with Ana Serrano

* Free Weekly Email Blog – https://talkabouttalk.com/blog/#newsletter-signup

* Website: https://talkabouttalk.com

* Facebook group – https://www.facebook.com/groups/2512948625658629/

* Andrea’s email – [email protected]

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Andrea Wojnicki: Thank you so much for joining us, Tamara.

Tamara Finlay: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for including me.

AW: Okay, let’s back up and provide some context. First, what are the main media that you’ve observed people using at work – to communicate?

TF: Now obviously, there’s all kinds. There are all your typical ones, like email, text, chats, everything else. The list continues to grow, and nothing’s falling off. I think that’s where we’re, all of a sudden, the pace of change is just so rapid fire. As our world gets faster and faster and more complicated, I like to bring it back to basics. Why are we communicating? We’re communicating because we want to connect with people. We want to connect either intellectually, or emotionally, or to do something – more the action piece of it. It’s either the head, the heart or the hands. Depending on what you’re trying to engage, is going to depend on what communication style or what communicate channel you’re going to use. So if you’re trying to engage the head, you’ve got a lot more communication channels that you can use, you can pretty much use most of them. Whether it’s email, text, or face to face in meetings, pretty much any of it works. But when you’re trying to connect with the heart, it’s all about emotions. It’s all about relationships. Nothing beats that more than in person, face to face, because 55% is body language, right? And you lose all that. And that’s why there are so many misinterpretations – when it’s heavily email or text or other communication methods, other than the face to face.

AW: And if you’re in a sensitive context, as you said, if it’s emotional or heart driven, then perhaps that nonverbal communication is even more important.

TF: Exactly. Because you want a bit of more of the two way dialogue. It’s really hard to have two way dialogue in an email or a text.

AW: That’s a great point!

TF: And then the hands … so the three H’s or the head, heart and hands, the third one is the hands, that’s really where you can be quite directive, task oriented,