Instant Messaging in the workplace. Theory and practice: the great divide

I was getting ready for a class on virtual communication and preparing materials on the importance of IM in today’s virtual workplaces and I was trying to find a resource books on professional communication to include in my further reading list. I have consulted the textbooks I had available in my office only to find that the guidance they give is misleading, over-generalised and it seems like it has nothing to do with the actual practice of using IM in the workplace. I had a feeling that the authors of these publications have never actually taken part or seen IM interactions from real workplaces. It seemed like, I have, yet again, come across the great divide between theory and practice in professional communication.

The Effective communication for colleges, for instance, advises us to 

“Use appropriate vocabulary and language mechanics... Sloppy messages and weak language skills distract receivers, diminish clarity, and ultimately reflect poorly on the sender. Do not damage your professional reputation with style, grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary errors." (p. 115)

Seems like they are advising students to adopt a style but forget to say what constitutes that style exactly. What sort of language skills are they referring to? What do they consider appropriate?

For IM, the books tells us to 
"Be brief and send quick, short messages"
"Be professional" - defining professionality as sending only  proofread messages, and
"Avoid multitasking" - I'll come back to this one later.


Successful writing at work wasn’t of more help, either. The book advises me to only write about one topic at a time and not to include different topics in one IM exchange (p. 86). Well, anyone who has ever used online chatting knows that this is a rather hard thing to do, so again, I am not sure how the author expects me to achieve this. 

Then they say: Avoid unfamiliar abbreviations. As in an e-mail, commonly understood abbreviations such as “FYI” or “ASAP” are fine—even encouraged—in IMs. But avoid “textspeak.”

I like this one a lot, because -again- this piece of guidance leaves more questions open than gives actual information. Who decides which abbreviations are commonly understood? Why is FYI OK to use, but NP is not?

And of course the re-occurring: Be professional! Good thing is that Successful writing gives a bit more guidance as to what it means to be professional: “Never send personal messages, tell jokes, spread office gossip, or attack a co-worker or boss in an IM.”

Guffey's Essentials of Business Communication has similar things to say: Be brief and avoid chitchat, beware of jargon, slang and abbreviations, and employ proper grammar and proofread your messages.

Having read thousand and thousands of lines of IM interactions from a variety of settings, I can say that NONE of the guidelines above would actually be helpful in real life. Here's why: 

• There are no universal rules for IM usage in the world of work, so there is no point in trying to make some up... There is nothing wrong with “textspeak”, it’s fine to use abbreviations, emoticons, and as a matter of fact, anything, as long as they serve to convey our intended meaning. Even ALL CAPS are FINE (and they don’t always denote shouting).
• IM is one of the most important communication tools for people who work in distributed work teams. So “corridor talk” or “watercooler talk”, joking, teasing, small talk should not be banished, but quite the contrary. They should be encouraged, as -just like in physical offices- it is through these interactions that people create and maintain good and collegial relationships.
• People do multitask. They are engaged in multiple conversations, or they work on something while chatting to a colleague. This is the nature of working virtually, so you can't not do it. What you can do, however, is learn how to maintain several threads, how to keep track to your conversations, and generally, how to use IM  in the specific environment you are in.
• The key terms are not defined. When books talk about appropriate style, they should be specific. What does appropriate IM style mean? What is sloppiness? What is professionalism? If the authors find it hard to define these terms, it is perhaps because they ARE hard to define. These aspects depend greatly on contextual factors -  is IM intended to be external or internal only, what are the communication norms of the actual team, are there any discussed or perhaps unsaid rules of communication,  what is the purpose of the interaction, what is the relationship between the colleagues, how urgent is the task, and so on. 

Students should be taught to be flexible and competent communicators in any situation, including IM, and the only way of achieving this is  by showing them how language and discourse works in its closer and wider context of use. Prescriptivism and vague guidelines simply won't do the trick.


The books: 

Brantley, C. P., & Miller, M. G. (2007). Effective communication for colleges. Canada: South-Western Publishing.

Guffey, M. E. (2010). Essentials of business communication (8th ed.) Cengage Learning.

Kolin, P. C. (2012). Successful writing at work (3rd concise edition ed.) Wadsworth Cengage.

The gun-focus effect?

Today I had to sit through a meeting where an e-mail was scrutinized and identified as rude. I found the decision unjustified, in particular in the light of the fact that no communication was aimed directly at the people involved: the e-mail had all the usual (and expected) formalities - greeting, addressing, expression of appreciation, and even the ‘most critical’ points of the letter - the adjectives - referred to “the procedure”, rather than the addressee.

It is very hard to use objective, logical arguments in such a situation, however, mainly because computer-mediated genres, in particular asynchronous types, do not allow for instant revisiting, instant reformulation, instant clarification. There is no vocal tone to reveal intention, no loudness to signal anger or the lack of it, no non-verbal cues to clarify communicative intent. To make things even worse, the perception and interpretation of these written messages (both in terms of their content and intent) is greatly influenced by the social contextual factors related to the reader (see e.g. Ledbetter on the effects of the reader’s gender and the message timing in the perception of supportiveness of e-mails).It looks like emotions and emotional empathy are the key words in this issue - the emotions that are generated by  a written text and then perceived and interpreted by the reader, who is greatly influenced by his or her own preconceptions, computer-mediated communication competence and interpretation of the real or hypothesized non-verbal signals in the message in question. I think it is clear that we are standing on an extremely shaky ground for an argument about “who meant what and with what intention”. The question we can confidently argue about is rather “who reads what into the message”.


As I was listening to the arguments, I couldn’t help but recall the gun-focus effect - an effect that has been known in crime witness testimonies, namely that the witnesses were able to recall the central information (such as the type of the gun) with great precision, but could not remember the peripheral details (such as the face of the attacker). Researchers link this sort of memory narrowing to the emotions associated with the event: in the crime witnesses’ case the negative emotions allowed for the precise recall of one central detail, but not the peripheral information, whereas in the case of positive emotions associated with an event enabled people to remember several details of the event, but none with particular precision.

The reason why this topic came to my mind is because I couldn’t stop wondering how the emotions generated by a written message determine the details we are likely to remember? Could the reader’s negative perception of a message and the resulting negative emotions further narrow their focus to the elements of a message - to a critical word or expression - thus preventing him or her to see the ‘real’ content?

I could not find research to answer my question, but based on today's session, I have to say yes.



Ledbetter, A. M. (2008). Chronemic cues and sex differences in relational E-mail. Social Science Computer Review, 26(4), 466.

Yegiyan, N. S. (2011). Gun focus effect revisited: Emotional tone modulates information processing strategy. Communication Research, 39(6), 724-733.

"Dear teacher, I want to know what is the deadline?"

As a lecturer, e-mail is a great issue for me. Students are encouraged to use this medium, but more often then not they don't get the style right. This is because the norms of linguistic behaviour in computer-mediated interactions are not quite established yet, in particular in a situation which requires a more formal approach via a rather informal medium. Students would also need to be aware of the politeness conventions of addressing a lecturer and have pragmatic competence to use language the right way. 

I know this is a serious problem for non-native students, but the messages I get on a daily basis make me see red. Apparently, I am not alone: Maria Economidou-Kogetsidis did a research on the "pragmatic failures  in non-native speakers' e-mail requests to the faculty".

An interesting finding of her study is that students were overtly direct when they requested information, but used less direct strategies when they requested materials, etc. A high number of e-mails in the study contained imperatives, direct questions and want statements (very similar to my experience) - which then led to the e-mails being negatively evaluated, and the professors not complying with the requests.

An important lesson for students to learn from this study is that a "please" alone is not enough to mitigate the force of the direct statements and imperatives, and that openings and closing - in particular "thank you" is very important if they would like a faculty member to comply with their request. 

Although in most institutions e-mail interaction is not explicitly regulated (except perhaps the maximum reply time) it would be very important for students to realise that their language use must be status-congruent to reflect the hierarchical difference between themselves and their professors. 

If they do not use the appropriate address, greetings and closings, if they do not use an appropriate level of mitigation and their language is too direct, their e-mails "may sometimes verge on impoliteness". 

So what shall I reply to this student?

Dear surname:

I want know what's the deadline?

Thank you very much.

The article:

Economidou-Kogetsidis, M. (2011). “Please answer me as soon as possible”: Pragmatic failure in non-native speakers’e-mail requests to faculty. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(13), 3193-3215.

Virtual work - again

I have just found this great little report on the necessary competences for virtual work (click here for the original report). The literature review is very thorough - it really sums up everything that is out there about the skills necessary for someone to work in or lead a virtual team.

You probably won't be suprised to learn that -again- communication competency came in as the TOP requirement (n=45) for both leaders and team members who work virtually.

I find it very interesting that there is so much talk about the importance of choosing the right media for the purpose, the "brief but understandable" style, "being a good listener", the interpretation of the signals sent by team members,  yet so few people realise that we are missing the bigger picture here...

It is impossible to address these issues above unless we understand that communication via the "new", in particular text-based channels is something we can NOT do naturally, merely by drawing on our experiences from previous linguistic encounters. E-mail and instant messenger is NOT like speech and NOT like writing. It's neither speech written down, nor writing that sounds like speech. 

It's a whole new genre with its own rules, strategies and norms, with its not fully conventionalised conventions and creative practices, the majority of which is aimed at capturing a hypothesised prosody or pronunciation of spoken language. 

So before talking about being brief but understandable or being a good listener, or learning to interpret other people's signals, people need to become aware of HOW they can achieve these. What does a brief message look like? Does it mean character count? How can we signal interest and listenership in writing? What are the signals others are using and do we all share the meanings?

Hard, eh? 

So here's an example of what I meant above... What did you hear in your inner ear when you read my "eh"? Am I trying to do some sort of dialect? Or am I only trying to be informal? Do you think you heard the same prosody what I intended? Is this a good way to signal interest in the other person's opinion, but in a no-too-direct way? 

On 'okay'... and on academic language

I was working on the analysis of the extract below, to make sense of the inarticulable letter repetition at the beginning of the conversation.

1. Chris | 10:29 | hello thereeee 
2. Kate | 10:29 | Hello there
3.  Kate | 10:29 | did you get my triage report yesterday
4. Chris | 10:30 | how are you today? (angel) or (devil) ?
5. Chris | 10:30 | i did, not opened yet 
6. Kate | 10:30 | (angel)
7. Chris | 10:31 | coooool 
8. Chris | 10:31 | ok quickie then - any news from the training?

As I was forging my way through the subtle and hidden cues used by the boss (can you guess which speaker is it?) to minimise the power difference between herself and her subordinate and to create a friendly, informal virtual working environment, I stumbled upon the tiny "ok" in line 8. 


My inner conversation analyst came round right away: ok is quite an important token here, an acknowledgement of the discussion before, but also a sign of moving on to the next topic. I did a bit of research so that I can support my interpretation, when I found this beauty:


"Okay" is employed pivotally, in the midst of yet at precise moments of transition, by recipients and current speakers alike, across a variety of speech exchange systems (both casual and institutional), not just in any sequential environment but where what is 'at stake' involves movements from prior to nextpositioned matter(s). 


Did you not get it? Never mind. It took me several attempts too. 


This is the source if you would like to read the whole paper: 
Beach, W. (1993) Transitional regularities for `casual' "Okay" usages. Journal of Pragmatics analysis. J.M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 


It is really very interesting, once you get past the academic lingo. 

Written speech, spoken writing ... and the words

I came across a table about the most frequently used words in spoken and written genres in James Pennebaker's book on "The Secret Life of Pronouns", so I did a quick analysis on my cca. 300.000 words workplace Instant Message corpus. The search was nothing complicated, I defined words as string of characters divided by a space.

The beginning of the list is very similar to that of Pennebaker's (page 26), but some of the results are rather interesting.  

There are no abbreviations in the top list, for instance. Check out you and u - both quite frequent, but the "traditional" spelling is far ahead its "easier to type, time/effort-saving" little brother.

Or have a look at the verbs. If I don't consider the auxiliaries, there is only one verb on the top list:  call . People Instant Messaging at work don't write, don't type. They call. Or would rather call. Or ARE in a call. 

Finally, the modest just  at rank 30.  Of course just has several meanings, but knowing my data I can tell that it is mostly used as an adverb in a minimiser function. An evidence for the fact that in workplace interactions people really have to make an effort to find the fine balance between getting things done and not offending colleagues. Just is a very useful politeness device to achieve this. Just think about it. (sorry for the pun:)

I'm sure that the corpus holds more interesting facts. I'll keep you posted.

Interdisciplinarity, communication studies and other curiosities

I've just returned from Nijmegen, Holland, where I attended the conference of the Association for Business Communication. During the the three days of the conference I have been in and out of presentations that covered an unbelievably wide range of topics. Some strands took a rather applied approach and looked at teaching materials for business communication, others reported the findings of research conducted on social media and corporate communication, for instance the effect of business tweets, or a comparison of corporate Facebook and YouTube.

One of my secret agendas during the conference has been to gain a clearer understanding of what this vague field of "business communication" entails. After listening to numerous talks I can report that there is lots of statistical analyses,  standard deviations, control groups, interviews and surveys involved.

But I somehow missed the communication element of this whole issue, the interaction, the transmission of information, the negotiation of meaning. Language.

Some speakers did address (or at least  acknowledge) the importance of linguistic awareness, discourse and various linguistic or discursive strategies in the field of business communication:  Jane Johansen for instance described a very effective model of intercultural business communication and highlighted the language/linguistic awareness as one of the key components of the constructed taxonomy necessary for successful intercultural business encounters. 

But for the most parts  "communication" people seemed to build sky-high towers on the foundations made up of the findings from language studies and linguistics without being fully aware of the components of that foundation. I heard a presentation about the communicative functions of apologies where the presenters only considered the word "sorry", without acknowledging that other linguistic and discursive strategies might as well function as apology. There was very little reference to the classic politeness theory, not to mention the newest developments in linguistic politeness research.

I attended a session on how the "language of the workplace" is taught at an UAE university, where "language" was predominantly  misrepresented by slogans and jingles from adverts.

Or there was the keynote speaker, Peter Kerkhof talking about corporate communication via social media, going into lengthy explanations about the manipulation of the messages and their effect on the customers, without mentioning the word "pronoun" once!

After talking to colleagues at the conference, it seems that I am not alone with my confusion regarding this apparent lack of connection between language studies, linguistics and "communication". So perhaps that should be the next thing on my agenda: facilitating or building this link, instead of trying to make sense of it.