{"id":4590,"date":"2025-05-08T18:37:53","date_gmt":"2025-05-08T18:37:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aomtodayprod.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=4590"},"modified":"2025-07-09T15:41:30","modified_gmt":"2025-07-09T15:41:30","slug":"the-new-world-of-communication-among-colleagues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aom.org\/today\/the-new-world-of-communication-among-colleagues\/","title":{"rendered":"The New World of Communication among Colleagues"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Daniel Butcher <\/a><\/p>\r\n

Even though many companies require employees to be in the office two, three, or even five days a week, communication methods among coworkers haven\u2019t gone back to the ways they were pre-pandemic \u2026 but that isn\u2019t necessarily a negative.<\/p>\r\n

Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot<\/a> of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter said that employees\u2019 communication styles don\u2019t have to go back to how they were five or 10 years ago to be effective.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cA lot of the more agile organizations and agile employees were able to essentially develop better, more efficient ways of working that they didn\u2019t really know existed or that they didn\u2019t have access to previously,\u201d Methot said.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cThey don\u2019t have to come back to the office and talk to each other in person at the end of every day\u2014maybe weekly, or maybe just monthly\u2014and they can continue to communicate over Slack, Zoom, or Teams, where they felt more comfortable and it was more efficient for them to communicate more openly,\u201d she said.<\/p>\r\n

The first step is understanding the changes with professional communication. Ask whether technology-mediated communication can enable sustainable success over the long term.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cIf we can be successful by communicating via various channels, not just face-to-face , maybe we react to that in a way that is a little more flexible, but being very strategic and thoughtful,\u201d Methot said. \u201cIt does take an all-hands-on-deck attitude\u2014let\u2019s understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing this.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

Leaders and managers who fail to listen to and take into account employees\u2019 preferences for communication, which ties in to where and how they prefer to work, are likely to hurt morale and encounter resistance. Insisting on being in the office five days a week and always conducting face-to-face meetings, just like before the pandemic, isn\u2019t likely to be popular or help with retention.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cI do think the pushback comes when senior leaders are saying, \u2018We don\u2019t care if what you were doing was working; we\u2019re all going to come back into the office five days a week anyway,\u201d Methot said.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cThe goal would be to take stock of all of the mechanisms and processes that we might have developed during that time that could be really successful, taking those into account and seeing how we might be able to integrate those into our work ecosystem in a way that helps support some of the new practices that we might develop,\u201d she said.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

A sample of Methot\u2019s AOM research findings:<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n