‘The anti-behaviours’
Ultimately, a company’s communication will be shaped by the laxity of a social media platform – and, generally speaking, that’s a bad omen for companies looking to maintain a semblance of order. Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of the cloud-based document editor Coda says: “If you want your company to feel like everyone is on Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook all day long, you can create that environment. I think that’s pretty bad.”
The emphasis on DMs will likely grow with time, but the hiccups will remain and perhaps grow more apparent as calls for greater work-life balance gain traction. “Understanding when it is [time] to ignore the buzz from a phone or laptop isn’t easy for many,” says D’Souza. “Organisations and individuals both need to reflect on what that does for the balance of work and life, and be clear on reasonable expectations.”
Going forward, younger companies looking to exude a technologically savvy and more laidback ethos will champion quicker communication tools, especially if they’re looking to appeal to Gen Z workers, who are primed to dominate the workforce by 2030. Various experts have argued that companies will have to lure younger workers onto payroll by offering their preferred communications tools, which means using social media. And to be sure, in a remote-working world, DMs are the medium that allows colleagues to get to know each other, so companies might emphasise them as a way to build culture and camaraderie. For her part, Farrell says DMs are “a huge part of how I have gotten to know my colleagues”.
As a leader in Silicon Valley who helped devise the Microsoft Office email client, Mehrotra is an advocate for hopeful solutions that ostensibly make workplace communication better. Still, he thinks companies ultimately transition to social media channels to mask underlying issues. He says “regularly switching to ad hoc, personal communication channels mostly happens out of frustration with a core communication system that isn’t working”. Companies ultimately switch to this format to fill a cultural void, says Mehrotra. Using social media, in his view, is “a lagging indicator of broken underlying culture”.
Companies reckoning with the problems of social media-based communications will have to do some soul-searching, believes Mehrotra, but it is possible to reverse back to the old guard. “I think communication flows downhill,” he says. “So, if you’re finding your company over-reliant on pinging people in personal text messages, hunting them down on Facebook and WhatsApp, then work your way back to why the internal systems didn’t work.”
For his part, Mehrotra says he has a “love-hate relationship with this whole transition away from email”. Mehrotra says communicating on social-media platforms for work incentivises all the worst kinds of communication habits. “All the behaviours that those tools are designed to encourage,” he says, “are actually the anti-behaviours of what you want.”
