At a Christmas party over the weekend, I had an extended conversation with my wife’s cousin about his position with a major technology contractor. His firm holds billion-dollar contracts with the U.S. government and has dealt on some level with most industry leading companies. He manages employees around the country and is about as wired as one can be, never without his Blackberry, laptop, and the countless other digital assistants that are common amongst professionals of his ilk. While we were at the party, in fact, he sent and received several work-related e-mails. By most standards, my mobile communications center is quite pedestrian, currently limited to an outdated cell phone that alerts me to incoming calls only about 50% of the time. He asked where my office was now located and I explained that Matt and I have been working from home for the past few months and plan on doing so until we see a real need to occupy traditional office space once again. He immediately asked how often we met and I told him that we typically get together a couple times a week to speak in person and bounce ideas off of one another.

His pleasure with my response was evident and he went on to explain that he is currently involved in a project that involves employees from all over the country. And although everyone is readily available via phone and/or e-mail, the lack of face-to-face communication, in his opinion, has greatly hindered the progress that he feels the team could be making. As the conversation progressed, we were both quick to point out the great advantages that e-mail and mobile phones offer with regards to work-related communication and the virtually constant availability that it creates among employees. Yet we both agreed that there are essential elements of old fashioned face-to-face communication that simply cannot be captured via phone, e-mail, or even video conferencing, which at this point really couldn’t be considered as mainstream.

Primarily, I think there is a level of focus that is required in a face-to-face encounter that encourages clear and effective communication. If I am engaged in a discussion with a person or people in my presence, it is impossible for my mind to wander without them realizing it immediately. This is obviously not true in a phone conversation, during which I could be simultaneously driving, eating lunch, or typing an e-mail. Because of the immediacy of face-to-face exchanges, I think there is a tendency to continually clarify and re-state points that may initially be unclear or potentially confusing. And while there is immediacy in a phone conversation, the lack of the other person’s presence, in my opinion, makes it less likely that immediate clarifications would be requested or offered.

And while e-mail is perhaps the most significant communication advance of the last 50 years, it still falls far short of the effectiveness face-to-face communication. That is not to say that e-mail does not possess great communication characteristics that make it invaluable in today’s world. E-mail can be used as a digital record of our thoughts and ideas and it is an excellent method of quickly sharing ideas with large groups of people. Being able to quickly retrieve an e-mail from days or even years ago ensures that the original intent of ideas and thoughts will remain consistent. Yet because e-mail is not a truly immediate exchange (nor is Instant Messaging, which is really just a “really fast e-mail”), there can be no means of immediate clarification or challenging of ideas. E-mail delivers information and messages, but it can never ensure that the point, the tone, or the emotion of the communication is correctly received because the receiver must interpret the information without the benefit of the sender’s presence.

Ironically, it is the prevalence of cell phones, blackberries, and omnipresent e-mail access points that has brought the importance of face-to-face communication into greater focus for me. Communication is happening more often at this very minute than at any other time in the course of human history. In the time it’s taken you to read this, more text messaging content has probably been sent and delivered than the sum total of every telegraph message ever sent. Is that possible? Probably not – but I bet it’s getting close and three more teenage girls could probably push us over the top.

In just the last few days, another small example of the importance of face-to-face communication has arisen. Several of the blogs that I frequent have been reporting that Jobster.com, the Web 2.0 darling of the Job Search World, is headed for substantial lay-offs at the beginning of 2007. Of course, there is conflicting information everywhere, including a blog post from the Jobster CEO explaining that all is well. The bottom line in this particular instance is that there are employees over at Jobster.com that may not yet know whether they have any job security. For those employees, reading e-mails, blog posts, and checking cell phone messages probably won’t cut it. They’ll want and deserve face-to-face communication about their working future, be the news good or bad. And the only way to effectively deliver the necessary information will be to do just that.

Tags: face to face meetings, importance of meetings, intra office communication, professional communication

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