Face-to-Face vs Email Communications - Essay Example

Face to Face vs. Email Communications Introduction Some types of media are capable of conveying a broad range of ideas, emotions and meanings. Television's ability to visually portray most of the inputs required for communication was a powerful reason for its success over the radio. Paintings being a visual media can communicate much more than say mathematical calculations. Daft and Wington (1979) used these observations to suggest that media have different language variety and the language variety needs to be matched with the task for effective communications. Various media characteristics theories have been developed to explain the choice of communication media for various purposes. The electronic media has changed the world of communications. Daily meetings, face-to-face chats and trips to other cities and countries are gradually being replaced with emails, teleconferences and video-conferences. This new breed of communications has brought solutions as well as problems for office communications. This paper reviews the academic work on communications in the workplace and the impact introduction of emails have had on workplace practices. Emails have also brought new issues for management. The paper discusses management practices adopted to address these issues. Communication Theories The consequence of introduction of emails in an organization is an important subject for a company using electronic mail. The managerial and working practices need to be adapted to benefit from the positive aspects of using computer mediated communications (CMC) and the negative aspects of CMC as well as effect of reduced face-to face contacts need to be controlled or minimized. Compared to face-to-face contact or telephonic conversation, the advantage of CMC include the ability to retrieve and search materials, overcome the difficulty of time and distance, one-to-many communications, electronically organizing and retrieving emails and other media and reprocessing of other contents with the materials to be handled by CMC. It is often debated whether email and other forms of CMC can fully replace face-to-face interactions. Understanding of the variables which limit the degree, to which the emails can replace face-to-face communications, how the email influences the decision making and participation within organizations, which types of email adoption are practiced by any single organization, uses and misuses of emails and the technology and/or discipline used to control email misuse are subject of considerable interest in the use of this medium of communication. The argument for and against emails versus face-to-face communications are often discussed in terms of Media Communication Theories. [D'Ambra et al, 1998] discuss the new organizational media with reference to Media Richness Theory (MRT) developed by [Daft & Lengel, 1986]. Media richness theory is often applied to determine the question of choice and effectiveness. The [Daft &Lengel, 1986] classification considered immediacy; the opportunity to provide timely feedback, Multiple cues; the capability of the media to provide meaning through cues such as body language, voice and tones, language variety; the capability of the medium to explain the message by using different words and personal source; the ability to convey feelings. This classification gives oral media over written media. A typical classification of different media according to [Daft & Lengel, 1984, 1986] MRT is as follows [cited in Mondyu, 1997] Media Ranking [cited in Mondyu, 1997] Communication Channel Score Face-to-Face 1.00 Telephone 0.94 Tours and Visits 0.82 Voice Conferencing 0.79 Formal Group Meeting 0.65 Computer Generated Reports 0.47 Memos and Documents 0.27 Email 0.13 Facsimile 0.11 However, the original Daft and Lengel criteria were not designed with modern communication media in mind, assuming Face-to-Face as the standard, produces a result that is biased against the Computer Mediated Communications (CMC). [Daft & Lengel, 1984] argue that a 'rich' media must have no or low ambiguity, they use equivocality for ambiguity. Equivocality is very different to "uncertainty", which is caused by an insufficiency of information to perform the task. If the chances of equivocality are high a rich media must be used for communication. [Daft & Lengel, 1984] define MRT as: "A process by which individual managers rationally attempt to match the characteristics of the communication media at their disposal to the requirements of their communication tasks in order to achieve personal and organizational effectiveness" [Markus, 1987] and [Sproull, 1991] added updated definition of richness to include multiple addressability, externally recordable and computer process-able memory. [Valacich et al, 1993] added another quality concurrency to make the MRT more applicable to the new organizational media [Ref: Table cited in Mondyu, 1997] [Dennis et al, 1998] argued that the parameters defined by [Daft & Lengel, 1986] are insufficient to consider CMC such as email. They include five more capabilities of the media to reassess the CMC. These include: 1. Immediacy of feedback: is the extent to which a medium enables users to give rapid feedback on the communications they receive 2. Parallelism: Defined as number of simultaneous conversation that can take place on the medium 3. Symbol variety: is the number of ways a medium allows information to be encoded for communication, for example, Text, graphical, voice 4. Reprocess-ability: is the extent to which the media allows the message to be re-examined or processed again within the context of the communication. 5. Rehearse-ability: is the extent to which the sender can rehearse or fine tune the message before sending over the media. When these parameters are included in the modified MRT the CMC appear to be significantly more powerful than those predicted by original MRT. Dennis et al, 1998 produce the following Table for media effectiveness. Apart from the feedback, where face-to face communication is obviously superior, email is better than face-to-face communications. [Reference: Dennis, A. R., Valacich, J. S. and Fueller, R. M., 1999] [Dennis et al, 1999] conclude that based on their inclusion of the above five parameters, face-to-face communication is not necessarily the 'richest' medium of communication. MRT has acquired significant support in explaining the communication media. However, many researchers have doubted its efficacy in applications involving computer mediated media [Markus, 1994; Rice and Shook, 1990]. Media richness is not something that can be directly measured. In most studies it is treated as an objective feature of communication media. [D'Ambra, 1998] state that reliability of MRT is weak when applied to CMC. The current approach in measuring media richness has a critical flaw: media richness is treated as an "invariant objective feature". People of different ability may also have a preference for different media. MRT can only be described as successful in predicting the effectiveness of traditional media. In computer mediated communication MRT fails to predict the 'richness' of these media. Amendments to include other factors which are a peculiarity of CMC present a different picture, showing that face-to-face communication is not necessarily better than email. A number of other theories have also been put forward to predict the choice of communication media. These include: social type theories where higher degree of IT maturity favors CMC over traditional media, critical mass theory; which is based on the theory that the choice of media depends on the media accepted by the society at large. Email vs. Face-to-Face Communication Issue The consequence of introduction of emails is an important subject for a company using electronic mail. The managerial and working practices need to be adapted to benefit from the positive aspects of using computer mediated communications (CMC) and avoiding the negative aspects of CMC as well as effect of reduced face-to face contacts. The organization needs to provide resources to effectively use email, to make desirable behaviors easier and undesirable behaviors harder or impossible. The email (and Internet) abuse can be prevented by declaring e-mail policies and preventive measures to avoid abuse. A survey carried out in 1998 showed that 75.5% of the email (and Internet) use was on work-related purposes while the remaining time was spent on electronic news, investment, pornography and entertainment related activities which were not connected to work [Gabel & Mansfield, 2003]. Employers often have a declared policy that e-mail can be monitored for productivity and liability issues. Dissemination of material in violation of company policy and sexually inappropriate emails distribution can make a company liable for prosecution. Technology is available to facilitate good email use and also to discourage inappropriate use. For example web based archive allows the management and staff to retrieve deleted message, read the mail archive, create records of email transactions and also let the staff know that their emails can be monitored to avoid misuse [Sherwood, 2001]. Emails are a possible source of viruses and antivirus must be used to secure the computer system. The company may decide to delete all .exe file that come attached with e-mail as a possible source of viruses. Companies also need to ensure that confidential company information is not sent over the email as emails have very poor security. Rules and policies need to be established to discourage misuse of company email system such as offering household goods for sale to company employees, arranging parties or whatever the company may consider a misuse of company email system. Emails have a serious disadvantage that unlike the past generations, the paper records will not be produced and history of companies as well as major communications relating to development work will be lost forever. It is therefore necessary that paper records are not totally discarded. With the retention of paper records of important mails, we still will be able to preserve a part of company history as well as development of importance in science and technology. An alternate would be to develop standards for emails storage for archives [Lukesh, 1999]. Training in email software, efficient use of email system, emailing system can be set-up to forward mails, respond to routine mails and may have many other powerful tools to help company work. The staff needs to be trained in using these facilities to make effective use of their time and email system. Companies need to make clear policies for email use regarding privacy, personal use, illegal uses, attachments and their maximum size and other possible policy matters. Conclusions People are still reluctant to read emails and to respond to them. Some people believe that urgent matters within company can be attended over the internal telephones and avoid reading or replying to emails. Others are so addicted to emails that they spend long periods over reading and responding to emails. Computer mediated communication has become an essential part of office operations. In a number of cases face-to-face communication is not the alternative. The companies are now expanding to multiple locations and mentoring, marketing and communications within various offices can only be done through CMC including emails. A number of people are now working from their homes and CMCs are playing a vital role in serving this employee base. Face-to-Face communication may have many advantages but in the 21st century using this medium has not remained practical. It is now a case of removing the possible problems from computer mediated communications to make it work better. It has already proved itself superior to face-to-face communication in many applications and there is no doubt that the future belongs to emails and other forms of computer mediated communications. Bibliography 1. D'Ambra, J., More, E. and Rice, R. E., Cross-Cultural Comparison of Organizational Media Evaluation and Choice, Journal of Communication. Volume: 48. Issue: 3. Publication Year: 1998. Page Number: 24 2. Daft R.L. & Lengel, R. H., Information Richness: A New Approach to Managerial Behavior and Organizational Design, Research in Organizational Behavior. 6, 1984, 191-233. 3. Daft, R. L. & Lengel, R.H., "Organizational information requirements, media richness and structural design", Management Science, 32 (5), 1986, 554-571 4. Dennis, A. 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