The pain of communication breakdown (amplified)

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

If you've dabbled in Twitter (Richard Dennison has just taken the plunge) then you might have been affected by the system crashing yesterday.

As soon as it came back up there were many, many virtual sighs of relief. I guess that's the problem when you so heavily rely on a communications technology or technology as a whole to keep you in touch with people - be they friends, family or colleagues.

Even the net (intra/inter) going down can destroy your email capability for the day, and mobile phones can elicit the worst of tempers when the signal goes mid-conversation (and that technology has been around for years). But these new web-based tools, and the constant, direct, spherical communication they enable, seem to frustrate more frequently than most.

Comments

[Richard Dennison]

I have just lost my Twitter 'cherry' after many months of resisting/refusing to get involved. It takes a bit of getting used to, but once you find the right balance of involvement it's actually very powerful. So much so, that I'm in the process of setting up a private Twitter group for the team I work in at BT - we are scattered around the UK and are almost all homeworkers - I think Twitter could be a great tool for binding/bonding us together more - even if we just share what we're having for lunch, it helps to keep us connected and keeps the conversation going.

[Alex Manchester]

I agree, Richard, it's this sense of being connected when working as part of a dispersed team or somewhere remote, something many people (both of us included) are dealing with on a frequent basis.

In relation to the above, once that connection is developed and becomes near-normal, it's quite frustrating when it's taken away (when the system crashes). For example, I'm sure there are those who would be happy, but imagine if we did all suddenly lose our mobile phones overnight and for good. Sure, we'd survive, but it would be like going back to the stone age.

At the moment I'm trying to figure out the percentage of contact you can maintain with someone or a team if you never see them, but purely rely on various comms technologies (phone calls, their blog, facebook page etc.).

Given our natural preference for face-to-face meetings, but a society that is becoming more fractured, with colleagues, friends and family all over the place, where's the perfect point of balance going to be?