This is an I-Heart podcast.

Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the new corner office, the podcast where we share strategies for thriving in the new world of work, where location and hours are more flexible than in the past.

Today's tip is to learn the phonetic alphabet. It's just a little trick, but it will have a big

impact in helping you be understood. When you work virtually, you soon notice this. You spend a lot

of time on the phone. And while sometimes your cell service

is sparkling clear, sometimes it isn't. If you have a hard to spell name or you're relaying

particular codes or websites or anything of the sort, miscommunications can be common. I know I have had to track down all sorts of things

that have come to some version of Laura Vandercombe, even though I thought I spelled my name clearly.

But there's a simple solution to this, as a listener named Lindsay recently pointed out to me.

Now that we are all on the phone more often, it's a great time to leverage the

official phonetic alphabet, she wrote. This is the list of 26 words that start with each letter

of the alphabet and make it very clear which letter you mean. A is in alpha, B is in Bravo,

C is in Charlie, D as in Delta.

Just Google phonetic alphabet, and you'll get the list.

This alphabet was devised for radio communication, which was plagued with fuzziness,

long before modern, sophisticated cell phones developed the same problem.

When I used to drive into the office, I sat beside the support team that assists

our retail store teams, Lindsay says. One day, I heard my desk neighbor rattling off a series of words

to convey a ticket number. Lindsay recognized that her neighbor was using the phonetic alphabet,

and she saw how useful this was. She also realized that her name, which is not the traditional

spelling of Lindsay, by the way, was different enough that she needed to spell it to people,

...