Reclaiming Conversation

by Sherry Turkle

  Rattan sees a disconnect. Her new hires, young consultants, are coming out of the best colleges and business schools. They have done amazing things both academically and in their extracurricular lives. But they are struggling with the simplest workplace conventions and conversations. She marvels: “They’ve designed their own apps, but they are socially inept.” They have a hard time showing empathy in the workplace. They don’t seem to understand the perspectives of their colleagues or clients. In today’s workplace, the first training often needs to be training in conversation. But it usually isn’t given its rightful place as a business priority because we tend to assume that employees know how to listen and respond.

  When a junior-level consultant went on Facebook during a client meeting, Rattan was at pains to explain to her why she had done something wrong. From the young woman’s point of view, she had done her “part” of the client presentation. In college, she explained to Rattan, after making a comment, she “always” went online. Rattan’s frustration shows: “I’m, like, ‘Okay, but you can’t do that in a professional work setting.’” In this case, for Rattan, changing the consultant’s behavior did not feel like enough. Rattan felt she had to work on her expectations, her approach to being in a conversation. As the consultant sees it: When people get together, they do their “part” and then check out. For Rattan, multitasking has left this young woman with work habits that make collaboration impossible.

  After a few years of taking younger colleagues aside individually, Rattan decided she could not work in these conditions. She began to make new rules for everyone. Her first was a strict no-phones policy for all meetings. Now, she says, “there is a parking lot for smartphones at the door.” For each hour of meeting time, she gives her consultants two ten-minute breaks. “That’s when people can check their phones.” Rattan fondly remembers the first meeting on her new regime: “It was the most productive. We got so much done. And from that point on, that was the rule. And if you couldn’t commit to that you could not attend.”

  One of Rattan’s colleagues, listening to her describe the young consultants’ trouble with attention at meetings, is brought back to the days of her first BlackBerry and how its red light went off when she had a message. No matter where she was or what she was doing, she could not will herself to ignore that blinking red light. In order to keep her mind on her work, she says, “I had to put stickies over the light.”

  Rattan has compassion for her young consultants. It is clear to her that they do their work assignments while doing other things on the web. That’s how they worked in college and graduate school. They don’t know any other way. But the impact of that work style is apparent to her. Their work is inconsistent; Rattan says that she can see the traces of their multitasking in the assignments they turn in.

  So you’ll see great thought, then you’ll see crap, then you’ll see great thought. . . . It starts out well, because they’re concentrating. Then they get an interruption, an email, a call, a text. So then, just illogical comments. I can see the interruptions in their work product. And so I’ll go back and I’ll say, “Hey, I like where you’re going with this, but it didn’t finish up too strong.” And they just say, “Oh well, I got distracted.”

  Rattan tries to teach her team to do one thing at a time. When she is on a conference call with one or several of them, she tells them that her attention is only on them. She is not doing email; she is not on her phone. Rattan makes it explicit. “On a call, I’ll say, ‘Now I am looking away from my computer.’ I tell them that the volume is down on my phone or computer so I can’t hear that messages are coming in. . . . I sign off the company server.” At first, the young consultants are shocked, but then they get the message.

  Rattan has had her own problems with focus. A few years ago, at forty, she found that her life of always-on connection left her always distracted. She was unhappy and unproductive. She decided to take action. When she got to work, Rattan began to turn off the Wi-Fi and work in an empty office. She segmented her workday into times online and off. This helped her to unitask because she had long blocks of time when email and the web were no longer a temptation.

  She suggests this strategy to others: Begin by admitting vulnerability and then design new behaviors around it.

  This realism about vulnerability is a business “best practice.” Technologies have affordances—for example, a networked computer can put you on a continual, stimulating feed of information. Designing for vulnerability means avoiding what undermines your attention. That can mean a “parking lot” for smartphones and tablets before you start a meeting; it can mean a “one task only” rule when you have to write something important. It helps to come to the design process with compassion for yourself and others. For you may have to say the seemingly obvious to young colleagues: You can’t update your Facebook during client meetings. This may be something they do not know.

  The notion of unitasking was picked up when the magazine The Atlantic produced a video on the problems associated with multitasking and suggested one remedy: a “Tabless Thursday.” One day a week, you can work only on one thing instead of keeping multiple browser tabs open. It’s a gimmick, certainly, but the basic idea is gaining traction.

  “Breathing the Same Air Matters”

  The director of technology for a large financial services company, Victor Tripp, tries to get his New York team—around fifteen people—to attend a meeting. Only three show up. And it’s hard to convince them to have in-person meetings with clients. Like the lawyers at AJM and like the staff at the Seahorse, they prefer to use email whenever they can. Tripp says that “typically, things get into trouble when too much has been done by email.” One of his team will come in to him to complain about a client. “It’s up to me to say, ‘Have a conversation, spend some face time, repair that relationship.’ That isn’t something they would come to themselves.” Tripp tells me that when he has to suggest an in-person meeting, “I’m usually facing someone who wants to send twenty-nine emails to fix a problem. And I just have to say, ‘Go talk to them.’”

  Tripp explains that his younger colleagues have grown up thinking that electronic communication is a universal language. So when they think about choosing a communication tool, they consider such things as messaging, texts, Skype, email, videoconferencing, and memes. That’s a lot of choices, and each carries its own “atmosphere.” But they don’t really consider a sit-down meeting. It’s not on their menu. That idea has to come from the “outside.” It is part of mentoring. Tripp sees this as his role.

  For Tripp, the shared experience of people at a sit-down is like nothing else. It is the best way to learn how your colleagues think, how your clients think. And, he says, “When people are comfortable talking to each other, little disagreements don’t grow into big problems.”

  The stage director Liana Hareet, who has more than thirty years of theatrical experience, has a similar experience in a very different kind of meeting. For Hareet, all the in-person meetings that lead up to the production of a play matter in the same way that live theater matters. “You get the unexpected; you get chemistry.” She says, “I love design meetings . . . when we all sit in a room and we go, ‘How the hell do we get Hermione’s statue to come to life at the end of Winter’s Tale? Let’s all talk about this. Here is my idea. Let’s all brainstorm.’”

  Yet, Hareet explains, in regional theater, in-person design meetings happen with less and less frequency. Electronic communication makes it possible for the design and technical staff (those who do costumes, sets, and lighting) to work on many productions at the same time. So it has become standard practice for a director to meet individually with each design director and share decisions through email. Hareet mourns the loss. Even the most dedicated email exchange is not the same as a face-to-face conversation:

  I send you an idea and you comment on it and send it back is a different process than us talking about an idea together. You lose the be
tter idea that comes out of the exchange. . . . We underestimate how much we learn and read and take in of each other’s breathing and body language and presence in a space. . . . Technology filters things out. . . . Breathing the same air matters.

  Hareet says that even when she gets her actors together, breathing the same air, she has to work to keep them present to each other. Only a few years earlier, she explains, actors came to rehearsals with the expectation that they would be listening to the other actors as they did their scenes. This helped all the actors develop a shared language about the play. Now, this attention to the community is something she has to enforce.

  You look around and actors aren’t paying attention to the rehearsal. Before their entrance, they’ll be sitting around checking their texts and mail. . . . If things don’t seem relevant to them, people claim “boredom” and go to their phones. . . . They don’t allow themselves to see the things that don’t connect to them as relevant to them. But a play is an organic whole.

  It is striking that similar comments come from a group of appellate court justices. Traditionally, they say, when listening to cases on appeal, a group of three judges met together, heard arguments about a case, and rendered a verdict. The process unfolded with a lot of meetings and telephone calls. Now, they say, they rely heavily on email before the case gets to its formal appeal. These judges are nostalgic for the rhythms of past practice, the time spent with colleagues that sparked new ideas. The judges are also concerned that generations of young lawyers don’t fully understand the value of presence. The lawyers who appear before them are less and less accustomed to making their points in person. As the judges see it, the young lawyers are eloquent in email but don’t have enough practice in oral argument. This means that they don’t stand up as well to being challenged on the spot.

  The judges, the director of technology, and the theater directors are circling the same issues. New ideas emerge from in-person meetings. Email conversations, no matter how efficient, trend toward the transactional. Emails pose questions and get answers—most of the time, emails boil down to an exchange of information. In acting, in law, in business, the loss of a face-to-face meeting means a loss of complexity and depth. A younger generation may be getting accustomed to this flattening of things. But Hareet believes that those who have experienced the change miss feeling part of an “organic whole. And they miss what the voice and the body communicate.”

  Mentoring for conversation requires that you address two questions. You will be asked, outright, “Why focus on one thing, as you must in a face-to-face conversation, when you can get greater ‘value’ from spreading around your attention?” The answer: Multitasking will not bring greater value. You will feel you are achieving more and more as you accomplish less and less. You will be asked, outright, “Why go through the anxiety of separating from all of your connections to focus on the small group you are with?” The answer: The more you talk to your colleagues, the greater your productivity.

  But behind these questions, these objections, there is something else not so easy to answer with research results. The demands of the workplace come to everyone on screens, and these demands can seem overwhelming. Screens provide a way to organize these demands, to take them at a pace that seems tolerable. Sticking to your screen allows you to experience some measure of control. When people resist moving away from their screens and toward conversation, they are often afraid of giving up this feeling of mastery.

  The View from the Cockpit: Seeking a Measure of Control

  Raven Hassoun, thirty-five, works in the financial industry. She avoids conversations with her colleagues. She confines herself to texting, messaging, and email whenever she can. For her, it’s about “maintaining sanity.” She describes her job as “a pressure cooker.” Sticking to her screen is a way of feeling in control of her life: “So many people put demands on my time. So many people want me to do things for them. If I read my email, I can hear all of these demands, but at a distance. I feel more in control. On the computer I can get up, or look away, or play some music.” Or, says Hassoun, she can check in with friends in a way that feels safe because it is time-limited. I’ve called this the Goldilocks effect—we want our connections not too close, not too far, just right. If Hassoun checks Facebook and sends a few texts and emails, she can stay in contact with other people but not risk too much time away from her job. What she calls her quick “social checks” make the demands of work manageable. And keeping her social life online makes its demands manageable as well.

  Hassoun craves control more than sociability. She will email a “Sorry” instead of delivering a face-to-face apology; at work, as in her personal life, when she faces a difficult conversation, she makes every effort to sidestep it with an email. The difficult, even if necessary, conversations take time she says she doesn’t have. And they demand emotional exposure. Hassoun sees emotional exposure as stress she doesn’t have to subject herself to.

  Hassoun’s protocols for self-protection leave her with a lot of work problems that email can’t quite fix. And they leave her feeling lonely. So lonely, in fact, that when her manager comes by to talk, Hassoun says that she will sometimes imagine that her manager gives her a friendly hug. And sometimes Hassoun says that she imagines her manager putting a reassuring hand on her shoulder. Hassoun understands that she is not permitting herself a conversation so she fantasizes a hug. But she is not about to take these fantasies as a signal that she should spend more time with her work colleagues. Her final judgment: “I don’t have the time.”

  “Get Together. Have a Conversation.”

  Stan Hammond is the CEO of a consulting practice that helps put together complex financial deals. He says that he understands people like Hassoun and their need to put some “white space” in their lives—the phrase I keep hearing to indicate “time out” to collect oneself. But he is also adamant that people who do not make time for conversation don’t learn how to have conversations. And that this is ultimately bad for business. He says that his job is made harder because so many people are most comfortable alone in front of their screens, in what the Boston lawyer called their “cockpit.” Hammond says, “Email—these guys are emailing all the time. I finally will go to their office and almost force a face-to-face meeting. But it’s not what they want.” He’s talking about people who, like Hassoun, want to hide behind their email but get to a point where that simply doesn’t work. The deal gets too big or something goes amiss. Moving things forward requires a conversation.

  Hammond makes it clear that email is an essential business tool when you have a clear, instrumental purpose. The problems, he says, come up when you fall back on email for every purpose, just because it’s there. In his experience, when it comes to negotiation, email will create a string of misunderstandings.

  He describes a recent board meeting where an important deal was being discussed. His client, one of the key actors, sent Hammond an angry email during the meeting. Immediately after the meeting, Hammond called his client to make a date to talk out their differences. When Hammond made that call, he and his client were still in the same building. But in response, Hammond only got another email, referring him to the first. A series of miscommunications followed.

  Hammond says that the incident is typical. People want to use email to avoid conversation. In a recent disagreement with a colleague, Hammond kept asking to see her and she kept sending him emails. Hammond says, “I finally was able to get a meeting, just to say, ‘Sorry, let’s clear the air; it’s five minutes, move on. No stress. Five minutes; it’s just a pinch, done.’” But he had to work hard to get that meeting. Too hard. She was acting against their common business interests.

  Hammond sees a generational issue in play. “People who are over forty-five or fifty are more comfortable with face-to-face meetings.” And those under that age “have a tendency to use email to avoid dealing with each other.” And also, to use email to apologize. For Hammond, the ability
to apologize face-to-face is a basic business skill. Not having it seems to him like “driving a car but not knowing how to go in reverse. This is what it must be for these people who can’t say these words. But email encourages this; on email, you never learn to say ‘I’m sorry.’”

  Hammond says he is not surprised by the difficulties people are having with conversation. He has two young boys who, at dinnertime, need to be pried away from their devices and then “sit silent at the table instead of talking to each other.” He is not content: “The more people hide in their devices, the more they lose practice in the skills they will need for success in the business world. They are getting faster with their gadgets but they are not learning the essence.” That essence, for Hammond, is conversation.

  This sentiment is echoed by the CEO of a large clothing company who tells me that his employees argue over email and then come to him as misunderstandings multiply. “At least once a day someone is in my office complaining about email exchanges with a fellow employee. And sometimes the person they are complaining about has also come in to complain. My message is always the same: ‘Get together. Have a conversation.’”

  But sometimes that is not as easy as it sounds. As we saw in Caroline Tennant’s day of Skype meetings, other forces are at work. In most companies, the workforce is dispersed all over the world.

  Dispersing the Workforce

  At ReadyLearn, everyone works in far-flung international teams. And cost cutting has meant that money for travel and training has become harder to come by. So, I meet managers who have never had a face-to-face encounter with the people they supervise. I meet consultants who say they have spoken with their supervisors only on phone calls and teleconferences. In this situation, people improvise.