Walking tightrope of half conversations and silence of body language in COVID times

Remember conversations prior to the COVID-19 pandemic?

You’re far from the only one if you think they were fuller and more holistic. This was because verbal and non-verbal communication were previously equal participants in the dialogue.

But in these COVID times of video-conferences and masked faces, non-verbal communication has taken a backseat.

Be it in an office setting, in school or anywhere else, reading body language and gestures comes naturally to human beings.

Welcome to non-verbal communication.

They say eyes are the windows to the soul. A side glance, an eye-roll, a wink or a frown seldom go unnoticed. The same applies to hand gestures and body stance.

The intensity of someone’s interest, enthusiasm, disinterest or discontent becomes difficult to decipher when one tenet of communication is completely taken out of the equation.

Which brings us to walking the tight rope of half conversations.

In conversation with Khyati Bhatt, founder and CEO of Simply Body Talk (specializing in non-verbal communication), Firstpost’s Nandini Paul tries to decode the impact of limited face-to-face interaction on our social and work lives.

How does the lack of non-verbal communication affect us while holding a conversation, interacting and communicating?

As social animals, 50 per cent or more of an individual’s focus during an entire interaction is on nonverbal communication (NVC) – how someone is saying what they are saying. If we could understand people’s thoughts, feelings or intentions while they speak we can either prepare for what to expect, what to elaborate on or cut short, how to follow up, whom to get in touch with, and so much more.

Even urban folks who might not have a highly developed language, communicate a lot through their non-verbal signals. Most of us know that people with less developed language require body language. What’s more interesting is that those who are sophisticated or evolved, too, depend on NVC just as much. Our expressions might sometimes be culture-dependent but our need for NVC runs across the human race.

In an era of social distancing and rising focus on technology and remote working, where we prefer to either write to people, speak over the telephone, conduct video calls (a lot of times with the video off) or speak with masks on, nonverbal communication gets lost in varying degrees depending on which modes of communication we choose.

What are the drawbacks?

Misunderstandings can be created when we are unable to understand the context of someone’s words. This has larger repercussions in the corporate and commercial worlds: deals not closing, revenue getting lost, teams wasting time on redoing stuff, projects not getting delivered on time, companies needing to rehire and retrain employees constantly as most workers, lacking the feel of a connection, leave the company and so on. Lots of research papers have quantified how much money is wasted by corporates when there is miscommunication.

Not just corporates, even individuals might lose out on precious relations built over time if the quality of communication deteriorates, which is bound to happen if the NVC bit is missing.

Your stress and emotions might not be read or understood by loved ones, and this can cause long term health and happiness issues.

How does it impact work, work morale, team cohesion, affect attrition rates in an organisation?

The minute a new employee joins an organisation s/he needs to get a feel of the work, team and organisational culture. Team managers need to dedicate the right type of time and effort into onboarding them.

NVC plays a huge role in how these individuals are accepted and made to feel comfortable. They should also be able to physically participate in conversations, meetings and meet fellow colleagues in person. Each of these steps involve body language analysis.

When communication becomes remote, most conversations are either deliberate or planned. This seldom bars new joinees from experiencing the chemistry in a team. For natural bonds to form within the team, physical presence is crucial.

Team managers have to adopt new strategies to ensure this happens regularly. Also, work from home diminishes loyalty to an organisation since bonding is affected.

Managers aren’t able to engage in casual conversations with their team members, which allows the latter an opportunity to discover more about the personal side to their bosses. This helps employees to connect and identify with their bosses on a personal level.

Read more here.

What tenets of communication are we missing out on now that there is a lack of NVC?

Let’s start with a small example. The most crucial part of a conversation is eye contact, which is almost entirely missing in remote communication. Maintaining eye contact with someone may indicate one’s interest in a subject, showcase confidence while speaking or flag hints of disinterest. Use of the right amount of eye contact is necessary to establish one’s case, convey one’s opinion and so on and so forth.

How does one judge something in multi-person video calls? Also, if one looks around to see people’s reactions on screen, it comes across as “darting eyes” to the other person watching. This may lead to misunderstandings. Again, if one wants to project direct eye contact, one needs to look directly into the laptop’s camera. If one does that, they miss out on watching the reactions of people.

When different hierarchies participate together, video calls can become rather intimidating for juniors due to close-up focus on faces. Their reactions might include a lot of self-touching or other tell-tale signs of nervousness. Managers need to decipher whether these stress signals are because of the video call format or whether the individual is reacting to the ongoing conversation.

In remote conversations, we miss out on facets like orientation. If we like listening to someone more than others, or identify more with a thought process or even like an individual more, we tend to orient our body towards them. This is missed during video calls. For team managers, this information would be tantamount to understand team bonding. For sales people, this helps manage their sales pitch, schedule follow-up meetings better and so on.

Similarly, when we regularly speak with someone just over the phone, we cannot build rapport through use of body language techniques. If we start indicating everything verbally, conversations can become very verbose. Plus, this would require the skill of constant introspection and deliberately voicing everything one feels. This makes for less natural interactions and often leads to digressions from the main topic.

What effect does NVC have on formation of relationships/bonds etc.?

Huge, huge, huge! It is difficult to establish just how much research there is out there that explains the importance of quality face-to-face time with people to form relations and to keep relations going.  Even using gadgets at the dinner table reportedly leads to ruined family relations. So, when we talk about interactions where people are not even present in each other’s company, there can be huge repercussions.

If your better half has had a stressful day at work, how would you know it if they are too tired to speak? Through their body language. If your child’s behaviour or attitude is changing over the years while growing up, how can you compare their actions with that of yesteryears’, unless you have physically witnessed it? Same goes for teams as well.

Understanding a colleague/work peer/client…

Lack of NVC leads to loss of loyalty among clients. Deals too may fall through where employees don’t feel a sense of belonging to their team or company. It can even lead to a serious identity crisis. Observations like an employee getting overburdened with work, untold friction between team members, promotion potential in a particular performer: a lot of these nuances are the responsibilities of a team leader and require sharp NVC skills.

What about meetings and team cohesion?

There are people who may argue that meetings are a waste of time. For them the suggestion would be to have some SOPs in place to make meetings more productive like assigning specific tasks to individuals to perform to keep the meeting on track etc.

One can choose to avoid physical meetings when only facts need to be shared. But for other reasons, there is no replacement for face-to-face interactions. In fact, there are times when managers should be having meetings (online or offline) where people interact outside work or have no fixed work agenda so that they can bond as teams.

In which fields of work is NVC communication tantamount?

All walks of life, all stages of life, all professions, all roles that we play – NVC is essential everywhere. Right from growing up and understanding the world around us to building crucial emotional and social life skills, nonverbal communication plays a key part.

In the professional world, one needs to build bonds, to shine, perform well and climb the corporate ladder for which body language is very important. Teachers, doctors, lawyers, interviewers, everyone needs the right body language to connect with their counterparts and also understand them for what they are.

What’s the impact on our psyche and mental health?

You can get frustrated if someone who was responding to you yesterday stops doing so today and you have no way of knowing why. If you were present in person, their reactions could give you a cue. Lack of non-verbal communication over time can affect your anxiety and mental health.

If your colleague gets promoted and you don’t, there is no way to build rapport with your boss or HR for the future because there is less opportunity for personal connect. Again, this makes for a reason for people to feel work pressure.

When emotions run high and your colleagues are not able to pick that up and support you, you might be overwhelmed with work and may eventually break down one day.

Even to understand your own emotions, you need to be able to closely introspect your own body language.

If you can spot stress signals at an early stage and stop them then and there, it can prevent long-term stress.

Do you think the conversations that we have nowadays are holistic? If not, why so?

Over time, the quality of our face-to-face interactions is also going down. The attention span of humans in general is going down because of the constant need to multitask.

We see the proof in our trainings too because the format is changing to make everything stimulating so that the audience stays engaged all the time. If so much effort needs to be put into holding others’ attention, how much is lost out on when they can’t look back at the trainer and understand the unsaid through body language?

Also, observing the world around us means we should be able to use the entire field of vision (180 degrees) in front of us. With laptop screens and mobiles, which we are almost glued to around the clock for work or leisure, there is a danger of constricting this field of vision. Hence our capacity to absorb rich information from around us might reduce.

When such is the case, our accuracy of understanding others goes down, again leading to scope for miscommunication.

Even during in-person conversations, we stare at the device in front of us while asking the other person to keep speaking.

This results in two things: One, you listen to only half of what the other person is saying, and two, you entirely miss out on their body language while having a face-to-face.

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