Are You Staying In Touch? Or Are You Out of Reach?

A ring tone from your BlackBerry wakes you in the morning.

Before you drink coffee or get a shower, you’ve already checked your emails, tweeted your state of mind on Twitter, published your Facebook status, and you can’t wait to check your online chat to see if anyone replied to your late-night question.

If this sounds familiar, the devices and social sites in your life have become your life. The idea of social networking was meant to draw you closer to people; instead it is drawing you into your hand-held device.

Staying in touch with friends is not easy in a busy world. Sometimes you have time only to send a quick message.

Using the technology, you communicate, but how connected are you from a friendship standpoint?

You share many snippets of your life, thoughts and other distractions, but what do you get in return?

What emotional value are you getting when you receive a 140-character tweet from an acquaintance?

Do you have 602 Facebook friends you absolutely need?

Are they your true friends?

And are you using your social media platforms to keep people at a distance?

If this sounds like you, then maybe it’s time to rethink how much you are giving to relationships where the emotional value does not match the energy you put in.

Look for balance in your online presence.
Choose one outlet and make a promise to yourself to check it once every two to three days.
Consider reaching out to an online counselor who can help you explore the meaning behind your urgent need to tweet, post and ping, when you could be connecting with friends and spending quality time together. Whether it’s fear of being alone or fear of being with people, a trained professional can help you understand your own motivations without all the electronic interface that can clutter your day and ultimately your soul.

Comments

What did I say yesterday?

Look at what messages have gone out before communicating new ones. A huge mistake managers often make is to communicate new messages without reviewing what they've already said on the subject in the past, hoping no one will notice. Imagine how far a politician would get using that approach. Unfortunately, we can imagine it all too well. The mistake is not in forgetting what you've said before; with all the messages coming from the CEO, the website, from various marketing and customer service campaigns, it's no wonder we cannot remember what we said yesterday. However, it is our job to either know or find out exactly how we characterize our messages and what we share, even long after we've shared it. For example, if you tell your team to focus on continuous improvement and then a week later, in a weak moment, yell at someone for taking too much time to reevaluate a process, you'll lose trust and credibility--probably two of the most important badges

Ah, yes... The "C" Word

In the Communications field, the "C" word can mean numerous things. In Internal or Employee Communications, we often refer to big "C" and little "c" communications. Big "C" Communications tends to include official communications tactics and products that get everyone's attention in an organization: posters, banners, advertising, website splash pages, e-newsletters, town halls and major 'memos', to name a few. Little "c" communications tends to be the internal, day-to-day business communications in a workplace about doing the work itself such messages about new procedures, processes, policies and plans, also internal emails, operational and tactical messages. The "C" word that is missing from this discussion is Culture. These are the ideas and messages that Culture communicates: How people behave in their workplace. What the culture tolerates as appropriate or inappropriate behaviour. For example, what goes

Be interested in your employees.

Walk around the office and chat one-on-one with people, ask them about themselves, their day-to-day work, their kids, how their weekend was. If you make time to also walk around your corporate office and talk to people individually, they remember that and will cut you a little slack when you’ve got to rush out the door the next time. It also allows you to get to know your people well, what makes them tick and what makes them successful or what makes them do their best. Knowing your people and having a relationship or personal connection with them, however small, allows your organization to want to perform better. Those employees become a lot more willing to go above and beyond the call of duty for you. Just make sure you are consistent. You don't want to be that manager who tries something once or twice and then gets too busy to keep it up.

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