Skip to main content

Face Time

 I had heard about this 7-38-55 rule previously but a friend asked recently if this may be one of the drivers for return to office. Seems like an interesting argument at first blush - if the body language is what conveys the majority of information in a communication makes sense that people are in the same room. Reality of in-person meetings and discussions these days is that people are continuously distracted by their phones and watches if on the rare occasion that they show up without their laptop. There is always someone who is triple booked and has prioritized your meeting over their other two and be in the room with you.

This person has a third of their attention on the conversation while they field messages coming from the two other discussions that they are not available for. It may turn out that this individual is also crucial to arriving at a solution to the problem you have. Their retention rate based on the formula is at most 18% of what they see of the body language in the room assuming they are observing everyone all the time. Since that is impossible given their pre-occupations with other threads of conversations happening online, we could say they are probably getting less than 10% of what is visually happening in the room. 

At that point the value of this whole push to get a bunch of people face to face with each other to improve productivity, expedite decision-making etc., turns a bit ridiculous. Everyone could have stayed home and the issue could have been resolved via email with only about 3% less effectiveness. There was a time when people were not carrying laptops everywhere they went, when cellphones were not ubiquitous and your watch just told time and nothing else. 

In that day and age, when a few people huddled together to resolve a problem, there was focus on the problem at hand and the people who had assembled to talk it over. There were no distractions in the room. You could only be in one meeting at a time because it took place in a physical location. The triple-booked individual would need to make a clear commitment - could nota accept one and be tentative on the two others and keep channels open for messages. In that world, it is quite possible that efficiency of meeting in person well exceeded all other forms of communication. The fact is we no longer live in that world so those numbers need a serious review to give us data that we can actually use to help us in our times. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more