Communication is key.
That’s probably one of those statements that we know is inherently true by the time we reach adulthood. But I think many of us would be truly surprised by how often so many people fail to communicate effectively. Even people who majored in or got degrees in communications!
Words can hurt. If we don’t know how to communicate effectively, then we also don’t know how to express our thoughts, opinions, emotions, and so on, which could also devastate someone else without even giving it a second thought. Look no further than the current political climate in the United States: We’ve never been more divisive than we are now along political lines. Dinner parties can get very uncomfortable if someone “voted wrong.”
But things can get better once we actually communicate. As someone who studied communications for a while in college (before dropping out and pursuing solo education), this is a little anecdote of mine about a situation where way more communication probably would have gone a long way.
I worked in an office a few years ago that mostly transitioned to working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. I was elated about the change. I’m an introvert and a homebody, so working from home was always a preference of mine. The company hadn’t been interested in that, however, until the pandemic sorta forced their hand.
By this time, the company had also been acquired by a larger business that wasn’t really too interested in the day-to-day operations of our comparatively small region, and they were making a lot of “integration changes” that were certainly…a choice. Numerous clients voiced their complaints and even closed their accounts with us, seeking to do their business elsewhere. The final straw for me was eventually being transferred to another department and changing the scope of my work… With almost zero discourse or even a warning that it was coming.
The first hint that anything was about to change with my role was during that year’s holiday season. I received three Christmas cards from people I had never heard of at the company’s corporate headquarters. They all wished me a wonderful holiday season and promptly welcomed me to their team. Oh, that’s nice, but also HUH?????? It was probably around this time that I should have started asking questions. I mean, we were still a fairly new acquisition to this company, so maybe they were sending these to everybody? You know how we all do the mental gymnastics when we don’t want to suspect anything is wrong. I’m guilty as hell of that!
Before this, I was on a small team that worked directly with a particular workers’ union. We were fielding a good amount of phone and email inquiries from those union members, but the role was mostly a lot of spreadsheets, data entry, administrative support, document preparation, checking on the status of things, etc. Later on, early in the following year, and much to my surprise, we learned that they were basically dissolving our team and transitioning us to the customer support/call center team! Again, I say HUH??????
As stated earlier in this post and practically all over this website, I’m very much an introvert. I’m always joking about how I “hate people,” but that’s not exactly the truth. I do, however, not appreciate my phone ringing literally two seconds after hanging up from a previous call with yet another client who was already angry before they even placed their call. On top of the personality mismatch, I was also now expected to answer questions from clients across the entire company, rather than just the focused group of union members that I was used to. There were several times that I didn’t know the answer to their questions, which usually only added to the client’s frustration. I would ask my supervisor for help, only to be met with the guidance that I should ask my group of fellow co-workers in a Teams chat because they may be able to help quicker than he can. Many times, I was asking him because nobody was answering me in the Teams chat, but I digress.
After breaking down into tears on my lunch break one day in early 2023, I ultimately decided to resign from this position. Which sucked, because I was friends with a lot of my co-workers from the smaller company that got eaten up. I also loved having a stable job that I could do from home. They even let me continue working from home after our move to Kansas, which I wasn’t sure they would. Already having a stable income after a big move like that was extremely beneficial. But as I said, communication is key… And it was becoming evident that this company had almost none. There was even another job that I snagged just last year that scared me away because I was so traumatized from this entire ordeal.
I can easily imagine how different things would have been had more communicative techniques been utilized here. I was clearly uncomfortable answering so many phone calls back-to-back-to-back. How are people who are successful in those kinds of roles even able to think??? I’m pretty certain that my supervisor was well aware of that, too. I feel like my talents would have been put to good use on a different team, where I wouldn’t have had to spend my 8 hours each day pulling answers out of my butt. And had the idea for dissolving my original team been discussed with me, I could have, in turn, discussed whether or not it was a good idea to put me in that department. All before any changes even officially took place!
Anyway, in summation (don’t you love a college research paper trope?), talk to your people. It’s probably more important for you to be heard loud and clear than not at all. Talk to your family and friends, your co-workers and superiors, and even strangers. Maybe just don’t get in their windowless murder vans… 👀