Once upon a time, coworkers actually communicated by talking in real-time.
In fact, coworkers often talked in person—and that wasn’t hard to do, because it usually just took a short walk down the hall. The result was not only high-fidelity, productive communications, but also heightened employee engagement through human-to-human interaction.
Then came distributed teams, increased travel, and the acceleration of work. Messages—voicemail and email—help to filled the communications gap. Asynchronous communications seemed so efficient at first; we could communicate at our own convenience—never mind the schedule of those we were communicating with. But soon we saw the dark side of email—the delays; the reply-to-all; the spam; the ever-expanding inbox. So much for efficiency.
Enter Instant Messaging with online ‘presence.’ It promised the best of messaging and talking—efficient, real-time communications—enabled by knowing that coworkers were online, or ‘present.’ But the promise fell short as IM and chat proved more distracting than productive (for most) and certainly didn’t humanize coworker communications—emoticons notwithstanding.
The binary nature of conventional presence—indicating that a person is online or offline—became less meaningful as everyone has come online all the time. Manual status settings (e.g., busy and away) only helped with a tiny fraction of users who knew about them and were diligent (and honest) about their use.
Likewise, a major reason for not phoning coworkers—that they/we were so often away from our (desk) phone—has effectively been eliminated; now we’re with our (mobile) phone 24×7. So why don’t we use phones to talk more? Because just knowing a person has a phone is like knowing a person has a beating heart; it really doesn’t tell us anything about a person’s readiness to engage.
To be clear, talking with coworkers is not a matter of nostalgia—it’s more essential than ever in our dynamic, distributed work environment. No, it doesn’t replace the many other valuable communications channels that have evolved over the last 25 years. It brings these other channels together, synthesizing them through human-to-human conversation.
More importantly, it brings us together with coworkers—as people, not just names on a list. That increases job satisfaction and employee engagement, which is highly correlated with practically every metric of business success.
That’s our focus at Sococo—bringing coworkers together through natural, spontaneous interpersonal engagement. It’s about more than unifying communications. It’s about unifying people, across locations, through a sense of place, and a sense of belonging.
