Understand that People Generally Like Personal Communication

Email is great for certain things. It’s especially good at quickly distributing easy to digest facts: the office will be closed Monday for Christmas; the price of a first-class stamp is going up (again!). But it’s not so great when it comes to dealing with topics that are open to debate or require some amount of discussion. How many times have you been involved in an email chain like this one?:

"Can you meet Thursday?"

"No"

"How about Friday?"

"What time?"

"Maybe 3:00"

"No"

This kind of communication just isn’t very efficient. Depending on how busy your correspondent is-- and what time zone they are in-- you might have waited hours between responses. By the third exchange you still haven’t accomplished anything besides identifying a couple of times that don’t work and ensuring that at least one of you is frustrated with the whole process. Especially since a quick phone call can often resolve an issue that might otherwise require hours of back-and-forth to accomplish.

But there’s an even better reason to pick up the phone or walk down the hall to talk to your coworkers: people generally prefer personal contact-- whether it’s face to face or on the phone-- to email. Sure, there are a few cyber hermits out there who would rather avoid human contact and deal with everyone via email if they could, but these are the same people who would prefer to never leave their houses and who went into extended periods of mourning when WebVan shut down and they found that they occasionally had to go out to buy food. I’m not sure I’m over it yet. Most people would rather deal with you than your email, however, and you’ll almost always get better results in person than you would with an email. Despite the hype surrounding social networking sites like MySpace and the odd wedding announcement you run into for couples who met online, it’s not very easy to build a working relationship via email. In fact, it’s probably much easier to get a date online than it is to bond with a colleague.

Certain things that are easy to do in person are very hard, if not impossible, to replicate in email. It’s difficult to chit-chat in email without it seeming forced or insincere, and it’s almost impossible to schmooze with your superiors if you’re not there in person for those "chance" encounters in the elevator or at the coffee station. It may seem a little superficial, but those opportunities to complain about the weather or feign interest in your coworker’s kids are valuable opportunities to build your work relationships. Don’t give them up by hiding in your cube.