I'm Alison Beard.

And I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

Adi, today we are going to talk about virtual communication.

Text, email, Slack, team, Zoom, this platform that we're on right now called SWATCAST.

I know that I mostly connect with colleagues and authors and PR people and everyone else I need to talk to for work through these types of channels much more often than face-to-face, even when I'm in the office.

How about you?

Yeah, no, I agree. I don't have a lot of face-to-face meetings now. I'm not proud of that,

but I think that's true. I don't even have many phone calls now. I see people walking around in intense

phone conversations with people. And I think there aren't a lot of people that I have that,

even that kind of relationship with. I always embrace the phone call instead of the video call.

Anytime anyone's willing to do it. I'm like, yes, let's just speak to each other.

All right, well, call me. I'm not getting in a phone call.

We'll do.

But the point is that we don't often think very hard about how we're communicating virtually.

You know, either deciding which channels are best for which situations or the tone and language that we use when we're on different ones. We tend to just default to our own norms or patterns. But the problem is when everyone's doing that, it can actually be really

chaotic for teams and organizations. So it's not just individuals who need to think about how

they're doing this, leaders actually need to

start developing better virtual communication cultures.

Yeah, I know what you mean.

Look, I remember when we first introduced Slack and the joke was, gosh, this is great.

You know, if only somebody had invented a platform earlier that could do email, then we figured

out the kind of the different use cases,

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