Seeing the whites of their eyes

There’s an interesting post about the importance of visual speech information over at Beyond Bullets, which got me thinking about how important this can be in a project situation.

visual speech information (i.e. seeing the speaker’s face) facilitates the processing of auditory speech

This is something that’s particularly important in the context of webcams and video-conferencing - the fact that there’s a slight lag between the image and the sound makes following the speech just that bit more difficult.

Which is something to bear in mind if video-conferencing is a big part of your communications arsenal in the course of a project - while it’s often the only practical way to communicate with a dispersed team (and is a considerable improvement on audio conferences in my experience) it’s still a crippled medium compared with the alternative of sitting around a table.

One of the things I’ve always tried to do in setting up projects is to make sure that everyone meets everyone else physically at least once during the project lifecycle, and preferably at the start when the relationships are being established. It’s relatively intangible, but the memory of knowing what a person looks like and how they act can bring an added depth to video or audio conferences, and help lessen the chances of misunderstandings as a result of unseen body language.

Equally, if you’re mid-way through a project and there are real communication problems, consider whether it’s worth bringing everyone together physically - particularly if you’re trying to resolve disagreements. It’s all-too-easy to hold a position dogmatically if you’re only communicating by email - so sitting around a table and discussing the situation with the benefit of full body language can sometimes help to break an impasse.

Filed under Project Management |