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Sci Eng Ethics (2019) 25:1605–1607 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-018-0055-z

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LETTER

Balancing for an Effective Communication in Organizations

Islam A. S. M. Touhidul1 · Shahryar Sorooshian1

Received: 15 March 2018 / Accepted: 27 March 2018 / Published online: 1 May 2018 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018

Abstract Communication is an essential part of all activities of organizations. However, it is affected by technology. Today, email and social media are popular methods of communication in organizations. Each of the listed methods has advan- tages and disadvantages which will be discussed in this letter which tries to drive the attention of organizations to the need for a standard and balanced approach toward communication.

Keywords Email · Social media · Communication

Opinion

Over the last few decades with the fast rate of development of technology, the nature of communication has been changing a lot (Baruah 2012). To share official informa- tion, from the beginning, email is playing the main role in all organizations (Jerejian et  al. 2013). Email responses continually raise the stress level to a higher level for both sender and recipient so as to acknowledge, read and reply to a lot of emails consumes a major share of value adding time of workers which is unavoidable as the delay of response creates a sense of negligence or intentional mental harassment (Burgess et al. 2005; Kalman and Rafaeli 2005). To make emails more user friendly, the added options like read-request-receipt has reduced the stress of uncertainty, but the delivery receipt, auto reply etc. seems to have contributed to an overflow of the inbox.

* Shahryar Sorooshian [email protected]

1 Faculty of Industrial Management, Universiti Malaysia Pahang, Pahang, Malaysia

1606 I. A. S. M. Touhidul, S. Sorooshian

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To avoid the barriers of discrete communication, and to continue a long chained discussion within a closed group where there is an option to know who are online at the time, social media has become quite popular. Using web-based and mobile tech- nologies, social media provides the platform for an interactive dialogue along with the sharing of media files of diverse formats (Baruah 2012). Hence social media like Whatsapp, Telegram, Skype, Facebook etc. are used extensively for the purpose of communication. These tools are transforming the way organizations communicate as they are not only cost-effective but are also effective in terms of time management in comparison to traditional approaches (Baruah 2012). Another big benefit is that if someone in the group misses something important, others can remind him/her or even come out to share the desired information and meet the demand.

The issue is that as all personnel in an organization chart are not professionally supposed to be given the same degree and level of access to information, the pres- ence of lots of open or closed groups are obvious. Everyone in a group is required to be online most of the time, if not, there is back and forth, and delay to take a decision and act on it. But for any single message at any time, everyone in the group looks at it and is thereby distracted from his/her current task, and in most of the cases, it’s a pure waste of time for those who are not directly involved in that mat- ter. Again, as it is mostly based on mobile phones, confidentiality of information remains under threat as people roam around and mix with family, friends and in other distant unofficial gatherings. Interestingly, these chat room discussions create random and unnecessary responsiveness image competition, and can also hamper or shake work-life balances constantly as ignoring the recipients’ current situation and environment, sending messages is a kind of interjection into someone’s life.

On the other hand, in email, confidentiality and importance are controlled in each case and copying and/or releasing others from the loop is maintained, and even can be changed to a new direction of different people if and when required. But the momentum of any motivational or awareness event is highly susceptible to the response rate of the corresponders. Most importantly, any unexpectedly high delay or absence of a reply creates stress, frustration, and even sometimes long term rela- tional damage. In worst case scenarios, if the time is over to execute the decision due to pending reply it can create a disaster and the responsible person may lose his/ her position. So in such a case, the sender, failing to get reply even after resending and reminding tends to communicate over the social media as well, and finally as a last resort, meets the recipients physically which is undoubtedly duplicating and excessively processing the task. It is also found that before sending an email people talk to the recipients over the phone to confirm the worthiness and purpose of the mail where the email could be sometimes considered only as a document for future reference.

The social part in email correspondence is that the expectation of linguistic expression is so formal and sensitive in some cultures that even too short or too long a reply can create not only confusion in the recipient’s mind, he/she may also feel offended. Again, to decide to copy or not to copy someone in an email some- times creates a climax of motivation and takes the matter outside the subject area and the original purpose is forgotten. On the other hand, the less-formal nature of social media could be harmful when communication groups become a place to share

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Balancing for an Effective Communication in Organizations

non-related or unimportant information such as jokes, video-clips, personal com- munications, etc. This may require more time of the group members to follow the messages and filter the related one to their job.

It is evident from the organizational practices that both the email and social media option of communication have their own distinct strength and weaknesses, and benefit or harm as per usage in specific cases. Therefore, based on confidential- ity, importance, urgency, formality etc. it is critical to set a policy for any organiza- tion for the use of email and social media message applications to keep employee morale uplifted as well as serve the business better and safer.

Compliance with Ethical Standards

Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

References

Baruah, T. D. (2012). Effectiveness of Social Media as a tool of communication and its potential for tech- nology enabled connections: A micro-level study. International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, 2(5), 1–10.

Burgess, A., Jackson, T., & Edwards, J. (2005). Email training significantly reduces email defects. Inter- national Journal of Information Management, 25(1), 71–83.

Jerejian, A. C., Reid, C., & Rees, C. S. (2013). The contribution of email volume, email management strategies and propensity to worry in predicting email stress among academics. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 991–996.

Kalman, Y. M., & Rafaeli, S. (2005). Email chronemics: Unobtrusive profiling of response times. In Pro- ceedings of the 38th annual Hawaii international conference on system sciences, 2005. HICSS’05 (pp. 108b–108b). IEEE.

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