TWIMC: It has come to our attention that your casual communication in the workplace…

I wish some aspects of traditional would change and organisations would provide more options for us to choose our preferred method of communication. My work send my pay advice with a paper newsletter via snail mail every 2 weeks. How hard would it be for them to give me the option to choose to have this done electronically — not that hard and would save paper, time and money.

My son’s both send paper based newsletters – one by snail mail. Again give me the option to subscribe by email.

And finally workplace communication. I’d rather use GTalk to communicate with other co-workers rather than bother to send emails. But it means I have to educate them on how to use it.

I think writing is a very important communication skill. I’m not an amazing writer, but I’m a good writer. I’ve worked at it.

I communicate on different levels with different people. I find as I get more familiar with someone in day-to-day life, I can get more familiar with them in my written communication. There’s a balance.

That being said, if you look at this question culturally, you’ll see that the North American English is much more lax then in other cultures regarding this question, for example, my maternal language – French. Letter closings in French business are absurdly long.

“Kind regards” translates to:

“Je vous prie d’agréer, Madame/Monsieur, l’expression de mes respectueuses salutations”

And as the Right Guard commercial slogan goes: “Anything less would be uncivilized”.

On some levels I’m old fashioned. I think a well written text is a sign of professionalism. Then again, I don’t expect Keates, but I expect effort.

Lemme just spellcheck this thang B4 I submit it 2U!

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Hi Sue-
I guess it’s all about options and change. I don’t think I’ve ever heard one person who (once using GTalk, etc.) say, “I wish I could get the paper version of this instead.”

My email changes have been slowly changing. Moving mostly to GTalk and Skype and all my corporate email goes through Gmail now so I don’t have to deal w/ Outlook. thanks for you comment

Is traditional business writing dying?

I do not believe it is dying. It simply depends on how much know, and to whom one is writing.

Lets face it…these days the inside address is usually already there for us. We have no idea who will read it and exactly how it will be routed. We don’t even get a choice most of the time…the ‘e-form’ says “Fill this out in less than 200 characters”…you click ‘send’…and off it goes.

All buissness is not done this way however. There will always be a need for that personal touch, when and if you have the information and space to provide it.

Case in point:
Even the stogey blue chip corp knows about ‘learning styles’ and ‘cultural preferences’. This is why they have the luxary model with the fine leather bound lexicon, of which every word is approved by the French Academy of Linguistics and Culture. The car drives itself for you, and talks to you in the most pleasing manner possible.

The same company also makes the raw and mysterious sports car. It doesn’t come with a manual at all, but rather a list of stats about horse-power, curb weight, and litters of heads-up displays that beep in fast paced fragments of colorful and stimulating real time information.

Both of these sell very well! Sometimes to the same set of consumers….who still want BOTH extremes of the driving experience.

Writing is no different…
Sadly….we cheat the next generation over and over again when ‘assessing’ their abilities to appreciate and meld with the cultures and traditions before them.

Have you filled out a job application lately?
“We do not accept resumes…go do http://www.dot.willYouWork.forus.free.com and fill out the webform!”

Enter your life story in 200 characters or less…..
No, wait, we don’t want your life story…just tell us if you’ll do this job for free.
Ooops! Our database broke….maybe…no, you don’t get feed back on wether your information made it into the server or not, but don’t worry about it….if we care…we’ll call you. Maybe.

It’s not really fair to say traditional business writing is dead, or that the current generation can not do it. Many of them honestly never get the chance to try! It’s hard to provide an inside address if you don’t have it in the first place. It is hard to include language of pleasantry and respect, when you are limited to fill in the blanks and click the box objective style forms of communication.

Once their foot is in the door however….
It’s much like classical music. It may not be pushed and popular since the artists are no longer alive; however, it is still a world best seller. People realize the value of quality, balance, culture, and protocol when they experience it, and while it may be reserved for certian times and places, it will always be with us.

Is it a problem?

Maybe, maybe not.
One of the focal points of modern ‘cut to the chase’ forms of communication is that data is often mined by outsourced agencies.

Compay A hires Company B to weed out the fat and give them what they want on a silver platter.

Case In Point:
“Our department heads are too busy to be bothered with searching for and hiring their own team. So we’ve hired Monster Dot Com to filter out the rot and hand us the top 11 possible incumbants.”

Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars! If you attempt to contact the department you wish to work for directly (provided you can even figure out how), you will be blacklisted in this company disqualifed from all further postings!

In the end…department heads take what they are given.

Is it working?
We won’t know that until some brave soul starts up a think tank to find out. No doubt, they’ll be sued and challened along the way….since it took alot of people two decades to build in this new layer outscourced human-rescouring layer of economy…of course, they are going to fight to protect it and proove that it’s the cat’s meow of the business world.

As with most things…the truth is likely somewhere in the middle……

Tradition is being weeded out on purpose. Cut to the chase…drive to the objective. Percission, efficency, accuracy, profit….who needs anything else?

Time will tell…
As with most things…these ‘solutions’ will indeed create new sets of ‘problems’. And yet another layer of economy will eventually be created to solve these, and create some more new problems.

And life goes on….
At least we hope
And hope is a waking dream.

Do new entrants to the workforce need more writing instruction?

This depends on what you mean by ‘instruction’.

Best practices (or whatever one prefers to call them) will always come into play.

If you are hired to write reports for the American Dentistry Association, then obviously you will need to be briefed on the formats and styles that are consistent with their data pool. Some agencies use lots of bullets and citations, some do not.

Really, it is unreasonable to expect someone straight out of college to just write the perfect report for any industry or agency without at least giving them the manual of how it should be done.

As with all trades, there is a bit of a risk when hiring people on the entry level. First, they need to like the job enough to want to do it. If they like it (many factors to be considered, such as environment, compensation, lifestyle, etc), they will learn, and they will do. In contrast, no matter how good of a writer they are, if they hate the job or feel inadeqately compensated for the efforts, there are limits as to how much they will achieve before moving into some other industry, vocation, or both.

Some things…’training’ or ‘instruction’ can not fix. At least so long as humans are part of the equasion.

Do less tech savvy employees need more casual communication instruction?

Again, it depends on their role in the workforce. Forcing everyone to the plate ‘just because’…makes little sense. Many companies have tried it…forced out the ‘old ways’…and in the process…lost out on very important markets. They gave up the ‘known consumer’ in favor of trying to win a generation not even born yet. Well, someone took on the employee and consumer they threw away They’re fat and happy. Meanwhile…the tech bubble burst……and tons of cash and jobs scattered all over the globe…never to be seen again.

My parents still read print papers. They still use paper checks. They still watch the news on TV. They still use wired phones to plan their vacation, or heaven forbid actually go sit face to face with a REAL travel agent. They still fit in a major chunk of the world economy. There is still plenty of room for the mmm, ‘old ways’ of doing things. So why force them to do it the ‘new way’? Why ‘retrain’ a great old style bank teller and make them miserable, when there is still LOTS of demand for the ‘old way’…and people are still willing to pay a ‘premium’ to do things the ‘old way’?

On the other hand…some people hold transitionary posts and titles. A general secondary teacher clearly needs to stay abrest of the industry demands and needs, and prepare students for a well balanced combination of what ‘is’ and what ‘might be’, so that students can prepare in line with personal interests, and world demands.

I’m not convinced that this new generation will need any ‘more’ or ‘less’ training or instruction than those before them. My guess is that it will be about the same. Perhaps a different style, a different cost, and different sets of technology, but the basis is pretty universal.

Tech Savvy or not….
I believe the answer lay in providing services and products in any nich of which there is a valid market. Grow with the new, or you will perish. At the same time…don’t throw out the old too fast, or you will parish.

Hi Brian.
Thanks so much for your thoughtful comments.
On your first comment re: “is traditional business writing dying?” I agree that we are often limited by design (200 characters, etc.). I also like the way you’ve framed the idea that it’s not about the assessment and molding of employees we do but giving people a chance i.e., the ‘how much do you know’ and ‘to whom are you writing’ approach. Sounds like a trust issue in some ways. I like too that you’ve addressed need-driven options. This is important in our field. So many good analogies.

On your second response to “is it a problem?” and “is it working?” I suspect people are unknowingly weeding out tradition. This is interesting to think about – yes, a new set of problems.

Your response to the question around the need for more writing instruction addresses the problems that can’t be fixed by training/instruction (but often are viewed as a way to do that). It also addresses the need to use the right tool for the job. Job aid? Moral issue? Compensation? So much comes into play here.

thanks for giving us a lot to think about!

Brian -

I agree that the need more training/instruction in casual communication depends on role and the needs of their customers. Losing what’s “old/mature” but not broken I agree is potentially problematic for large segments of the population.
I wonder if the amount of training per employee has risen/fallen in the past say, 50 years. ASTD reports, in their State of the Industry Report that the consolidated average ratio of hours used to hours available (formal learning) has been steadily increasing since 2003
Grow with the new but don’t throw out the old too fast…a slippery slope.

Does this impact your current instructional design strategies?

Absolutely……
Objectives and target learners are the meat of any instructional design. Ideally, there is always enough time and money to study every possible detail one can imagine, in addition to those one can easily proove.

In reality, it depends on how much time and what resources are avilable to deliver the design to stakeholders. Sadly, there are always limits, so in the upfront analysis…priortities must be set and taken care of.

Interestingly enough, the question of tech savvyness comes up often. ISO standards are a wonderful thing. Educators and designers hopefully feel encouraged to learn how those are developed, and why they’ve worked so well over several generations of the industrial age. There is much to be borrowed and improved upon as we wade into the shallow end of the pool for our age of information.

I don’t think you’re old fashioned. I think you just recognize the need to treat people/situations differently and, as you’ve said, you have worked on it. Effort. It’s as much effort perhaps to be informal. I still use punctuation in some of my text messages but I’m trying to break that ‘habit.’ Blogging is weird that way…a little informal, a little formal…

Brian-
Re: impact on instructional design. I know at least one company (Aetna) that has been designing ‘upward’ to address generational issues. People will adapt upward but not downward. Sounds common sense. We probably spend a lot of time trying to please multiple generations when we only need to find the best way to keep people engaged and learning. Pedagogy before tools…borrow and approve. Absolutely.

Janet

I don’t doubt for a minute the ASTD reports are accurate. Schools are popping up like wild flowers, for pretty much anything one can imagine. It may even be the next ‘bubble’ or Wall Street craze.

Just on a personal hunch….
Industrial jobs are harder to find these days, and in the US at least, seem to require more and more specialized educational backgrounds and resumes.

Instruction is pretty diverse, wide open, and apparantly in demand. We’re quickly learning that people do want to build on their credentials. The only thing that was holding them back was ‘access’ and ‘affordability’.

Single moms in that dead end waitress job can now take a course here and there online towards a low end Associate degree, which can be applied to a higher degree, and so on. It was not always that way in the past. It’s also exciting to see how major universities are starting to accept the certification and learning module concept.
I.E. Rack up enough of those immediately marketable ‘tech certificates’ and they can be applied towards a traditional B.S. in Computer Science.

Somewhere along the line, the bubble will burst, and some sort of balance will hold true for a while. In the meanwhile, it’s a very exciting field to be in! So yes, training numbers should be on the rise….
Too many of us need a good job!
What else would we do?

Another analogy:
Kellogs buys far more cerial commercials than they really need from the big three networks. However, contracts are contracts….and it all comes back around. People need the work…communities need the jobs…and social engineers know this.

Lets hope we stay on their good side for as long as possible

LOL, I’m so with you on breaking habits of ‘formality’. I bumped into a young designer on Second Life the other day. We exchanged ideas and looked at some of each others’ projects.

I was really kind of blown away that we were trying to figure out how to get rid of the ‘complete sentences’ and blow any sense of ‘form or sequence’ out of the picture.

I have to be honest. I still scratch my head on that one. I’d honestly rather offer both methods to the learner where possible. I.E. I’d much prefer get a transcript of that 2 hour long lecture (that I can read in 3 minutes) than have to dress up and attend it, hearing the same ole junk that’s been driven in since being a 9 year old wolf cub scout (just with bigger words and less colorful pictures). They can keep the power points and videos. But that’s just me…

Research shows it doesn’t work for everyone. So we learn and build, and try to find a way to put it all out there, while keeping it affordable.

I don’t text much, and while that might track with my age, it also tracks with the fact that I don’t work with many people who text. When I text, it’s to my children (who text more often), or as a quick way of waving at my wife.

A lot also depends on the context of the message — do I need to send something to more than one person? Do I want or need to maintain a record? Email makes more sense.

(Hey, Janet: how come CommentLuv doesn’t seem to love me?)

Hi Dave. Age, environment, and context. Makes sense.
I don’t know why my Luv is not luvin’ you back. You are brilliant so I must ask…are you clicking the box to Enable CommentLuv when you post?

Janet: actually, the enable box is checked when I get to the comment box (like right now). For this comment, I unchecked it, and checked again, but my optimism isn’t high.

It’s not like I have a whole lotta weird software going on… Firefox (yet another update, alas) with add-ins for coComment (a usual suspect) and delicious.

So now I have documentation for my total uncoolness. Does this mean I should have said yes to the text messaging option on my new iphone? Or can I just get the cool points for the device?

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