Reclaiming Conversation (32 page)

Yet, Hareet explains, in regional theater, in-person design meetings happen with less and less frequency. Electronic communication makes it possible for the design and technical staff (those who do costumes, sets, and lighting) to work on many productions at the same time. So it has become standard practice for a director to meet individually with each design director and share decisions through email. Hareet mourns the loss. Even the most dedicated email exchange is not the same as a face-to-face conversation:

I send you an idea and you comment on it and send it back is a different process than us talking about an idea together. You lose the better idea that comes out of the exchange. . . . We underestimate how much we learn and read and take in of each other's breathing and body language and presence in a space. . . . Technology filters things out. . . . Breathing the same air matters.

Hareet says that even when she gets her actors together, breathing the same air, she has to work to keep them present to each other. Only a few years earlier, she explains, actors came to rehearsals with the expectation that they would be listening to the other actors as they did their scenes. This helped all the actors develop a shared language about the play. Now, this attention to the community is something she has to enforce.

You look around and actors aren't paying attention to the rehearsal. Before their entrance, they'll be sitting around checking their texts and mail. . . . If things don't seem relevant to them, people claim “boredom” and go to their phones. . . . They don't allow themselves to see the things that don't connect to them as relevant to them. But a play is an organic whole.

It is striking that similar comments come from a group of appellate court justices. Traditionally, they say, when listening to cases on appeal, a group of three judges met together, heard arguments about a case, and rendered a verdict. The process unfolded with a lot of meetings and telephone calls. Now, they say, they rely heavily on email before the case gets to its formal appeal. These judges are nostalgic for the rhythms of past practice, the time spent with colleagues that sparked new ideas. The judges are also concerned that generations of young lawyers don't fully understand the value of presence. The lawyers who appear before them are less and less accustomed to making their points in person. As the judges see it, the young lawyers are eloquent in email but don't have enough practice in oral argument. This means that they don't stand up as well to being challenged on the spot.

The judges, the director of technology, and the theater directors are
circling the same issues. New ideas emerge from in-person meetings. Email conversations, no matter how efficient, trend toward the transactional. Emails pose questions and get answers—most of the time, emails boil down to an exchange of information. In acting, in law, in business, the loss of a face-to-face meeting means a loss of complexity and depth. A younger generation may be getting accustomed to this flattening of things. But Hareet believes that
those who have experienced the change
miss feeling part of an “organic whole. And they miss what the voice and the body communicate.”

Mentoring for conversation requires that you address two questions. You will be asked, outright, “Why focus on one thing, as you must in a face-to-face conversation, when you can get greater ‘value' from spreading around your attention?” The answer: Multitasking will not bring greater value. You will
feel
you are achieving more and more as you accomplish less and less. You will be asked, outright, “Why go through the anxiety of separating from all of your connections to focus on the small group you are with?” The answer: The more you talk to your colleagues, the greater your productivity.

But behind these questions, these objections, there is something else not so easy to answer with research results. The demands of the workplace come to everyone on screens, and these demands can seem overwhelming. Screens provide a way to organize these demands, to take them at a pace that seems tolerable. Sticking to your screen allows you to experience some measure of control. When people resist moving away from their screens and toward conversation, they are often afraid of giving up this feeling of mastery.

R
aven Hassoun, thirty-five, works in the financial industry. She avoids conversations with her colleagues. She confines herself to texting, messaging, and email whenever she can. For her, it's about
“maintaining sanity.” She describes her job as “a pressure cooker.” Sticking to her screen is a way of feeling in control of her life: “So many people put demands on my time. So many people want me to do things for them. If I read my email, I can hear all of these demands, but at a distance. I feel more in control. On the computer I can get up, or look away, or play some music.” Or, says Hassoun, she can check in with friends in a way that feels safe because it is time-limited. I've called this the Goldilocks effect—we want our connections not too close, not too far, just right. If Hassoun checks Facebook and sends a few texts and emails, she can stay in contact with other people but not risk too much time away from her job. What she calls her quick “social checks” make the demands of work manageable. And keeping her social life online makes its demands manageable as well.

Hassoun craves control more than sociability. She will email a “Sorry” instead of delivering a face-to-face apology; at work, as in her personal life, when she faces a difficult conversation, she makes every effort to sidestep it with an email. The difficult, even if necessary, conversations take time she says she doesn't have. And they demand emotional exposure. Hassoun sees emotional exposure as stress she doesn't have to subject herself to.

Hassoun's protocols for self-protection leave her with a lot of work problems that email can't quite fix. And they leave her feeling lonely. So lonely, in fact, that when her manager comes by to talk, Hassoun says that she will sometimes imagine that her manager gives her a friendly hug. And sometimes Hassoun says that she imagines her manager putting a reassuring hand on her shoulder. Hassoun understands that she is not permitting herself a conversation so she fantasizes a hug. But she is not about to take these fantasies as a signal that she should spend more time with her work colleagues. Her final judgment: “I don't have the time.”

S
tan Hammond is the CEO of a consulting practice that helps put together complex financial deals. He says that he understands people like Hassoun and their need to put some “white space” in their lives—the phrase I keep hearing to indicate “time out” to collect oneself. But he is also adamant that people who do not make time for conversation don't learn how to have conversations. And that this is ultimately bad for business. He says that his job is made harder because so many people are most comfortable alone in front of their screens, in what the Boston lawyer called their “cockpit.” Hammond says, “Email—these guys are emailing all the time. I finally will go to their office and almost force a face-to-face meeting. But it's not what they want.” He's talking about people who, like Hassoun, want to hide behind their email but get to a point where that simply doesn't work. The deal gets too big or something goes amiss. Moving things forward requires a conversation.

Hammond makes it clear that email is an essential business tool when you have a clear, instrumental purpose. The problems, he says, come up when you fall back on email for every purpose, just because it's there. In his experience, when it comes to negotiation, email will create a string of misunderstandings.

He describes a recent board meeting where an important deal was being discussed. His client, one of the key actors, sent Hammond an angry email during the meeting. Immediately after the meeting, Hammond called his client to make a date to talk out their differences. When Hammond made that call, he and his client were still in the same building. But in response, Hammond only got another email, referring him to the first. A series of miscommunications followed.

Hammond says that the incident is typical. People want to use email to avoid conversation. In a recent disagreement with a colleague, Hammond kept asking to see her and she kept sending him emails. Hammond says, “I finally was able to get a meeting, just to say, ‘Sorry, let's clear the air; it's five minutes, move on. No stress. Five minutes; it's just a pinch,
done.'” But he had to work hard to get that meeting. Too hard. She was acting against their common business interests.

Hammond sees a generational issue in play. “People who are over forty-five or fifty are more comfortable with face-to-face meetings.” And those under that age “have a tendency to use email to avoid dealing with each other.” And also, to use email to apologize. For Hammond, the ability to apologize face-to-face is a basic business skill. Not having it seems to him like “driving a car but not knowing how to go in reverse. This is what it must be for these people who can't say these words. But email encourages this; on email, you never learn to say ‘I'm sorry.'”

Hammond says he is not surprised by the difficulties people are having with conversation. He has two young boys who, at dinnertime, need to be pried away from their devices and then “sit silent at the table instead of talking to each other.” He is not content: “The more people hide in their devices, the more they lose practice in the skills they will need for success in the business world. They are getting faster with their gadgets but they are not learning the essence.” That essence, for Hammond, is conversation.

This sentiment is echoed by the CEO of a large clothing company who tells me that his employees argue over email and then come to him as misunderstandings multiply. “At least once a day someone is in my office complaining about email exchanges with a fellow employee. And sometimes the person they are complaining about has also come in to complain. My message is always the same: ‘Get together. Have a conversation.'”

But sometimes that is not as easy as it sounds. As we saw in Caroline Tennant's day of Skype meetings, other forces are at work. In most companies, the workforce is dispersed all over the world.

A
t ReadyLearn, everyone works in far-flung international teams. And cost cutting has meant that money for travel and training has become harder to come by. So, I meet managers who have never had a
face-to-face encounter with the people they supervise. I meet consultants who say they have spoken with their supervisors only on phone calls and teleconferences. In this situation, people improvise.

One global team celebrates the New Year by sending every member a hat, a bottle of champagne, and a noisemaker. Thus outfitted, the team holds a teleconference and comes together for a toast. Getting the treats and having an online party is charming and unexpected if it is not the norm. But when it becomes the norm, it isn't clear what it is.

I was told about the online New Year's party as a funny story, an example of creative camaraderie. About halfway through, the person telling the story realized that he didn't think it was funny, he thought it was sad, and he didn't know how to wind the story down. My question, “Was it successful?” was met with hesitation. These things are as successful as they can be. Everyone is doing the best they can.

When companies make the decision to decentralize in this way, employees are asked to buy into a narrative that represents all of this as “progress,” or certainly what is needed for the company to succeed. But the day-to-day experience of this new way of work can make it easy to lose faith.

Victor Tripp used to have his technical team around him in New York, but his company's long-range plan is to use less office space in Manhattan and save on salaries by not hiring American workers. So now his team is dispersed around the world. Tripp is nostalgic for the old New York days. When he worked on the same floor as his team, he says, “We were talking all the time. I could stand up and see every person in the group. Shout out to them.” Now, with an international team, they schedule calls and teleconferences.

Recently, Tripp's team had to address an international system failure. The global network had to be shut down and restarted. Tripp is sure that if he had “his guys in New York,” he could have handled the system failure with dispatch. But “with everybody all over the world, it took a lot longer.” Tripp thinks that the new, dispersed team brings his firm less value than the centralized New York team. He is convinced that there
is a bottom-line business case for returning to the old system. But he adds, “Even making the case would cause all hell to break loose. Nobody wants to do a study to show that this [dispersing local teams] was a bad decision. When the decision to break up local teams was made, everybody said, ‘This is ridiculous.
Why are we doing this
?' But then, it was done.”

When Tripp looks ten years down the road, he imagines there will be even fewer people around him, and as for the few people on his team, “They won't even be in an office; they'll be at home.” And “if they want to come to the ‘office,'” he says, “they will be assigned a place to work . . . like a room in a hotel.” The notion of a team that sits together and talks together will be a thing of the past.

I know one firm where you go up the elevator. You punch your code into an iPad. And it says, “Okay, this is your neighborhood, where your group normally sits. And here are three empty desks over there. Go sit over there.” And away you go.

You go in, sit down, work. Some people are, like, you know, “I just feel like a commodity. I have no ties to this business.” I feel like I'm going to the library, because I don't have a picture of my family. I don't have—you know, nothing is mine anymore.

As Tripp and I talk about the disadvantages of regularly working at home, with stints at the “hotel,” the story of Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, calling employees back to the firm by radically reducing the amount of telecommuting is in the news. Mayer says she wants people together in order
to increase their productivity and creativity
. Tripp says, “I think that's a great story. I like that story.” But he doesn't think it will apply to him. Yahoo is calling its people back “home to work,” but he sees a future without a desk.