Every day there are more and more tools on the market, be it Open Source or commercial, to make communication with each other quicker and easier. Nearly every office has some kind of chat-tool in place that messages can be passed to any co-worker, without leaving your chair.
In combination with those tools, teleworking becomes even easier. You can contact your co-workers anytime to retrieve information. But not only with your co-workers during office hours, social network systems give you the chance to contact business partners and keep a conversation independent of timely limits. We do not depend on face-to-face communication.
This sounds great – you are independent of time and place to do business and you are away of your nerve-racking colleagues – a paradise. Or is it?
Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Professor at the MIT, developed together with his team electronic devices that can easily and accurately track social behaviour in a company. The probands were equipped with theses devices and there daily routine were recorded from their morning routine through out the day.
Comparing teleworkers and workers in a Call-Center, it turned out that the Call-Center agents where much more productive than their colleagues who worked from home. It confirmed what many researchers in this field suspected for years. Face-to-face communication holds much more information, instinctive information like body language, tone of voice that brings us closer, builds the trust between us. “One preliminary finding: People who maintain lots of e-mail and face-to-face contact report high job satisfaction and personal productivity, those who socialize less, even with the intention of getting more work done, express overall less satisfaction.” (http://web.media.mit.edu/~sandy/Honest-Signals-sb48_07307.pdf)
So social media makes the world so much easier but don’t forget good face-to-face conversation take you a long way.
(gf)
