Week 5: Zooms and Emails and Phone Calls (Oh my!)

I may be naive, but I didn’t expect to be reaching out to people so frequently — and in such a variety of forms — this summer. Today, for instance, I attended one Zoom meeting, picked up between 4 and 7 phone calls, and sent and received over 10 emails.
Such back-and-forth can be overwhelming at times; it certainly keeps me buzzing along on an otherwise slow day. Still, I struggle to come up with a clear-cut explanation for how I feel about it. It’s communication, and it can be quite handy to forward a message with key information or to meet with a group online rather than all commuting and setting up a physical space. It also leaves room for plenty of non-communicative actions, from non-responses and missed calls to CCing the wrong people or losing important messages in the sea of clicks. Instead of assigning all of this contact as “good” or “bad,” then, I’m choosing (for now, at least) to think of it as a system of communication that fits inside the non-profit/community organization world and that simultaneously has the potential for growth.
At the same time as I learn to navigate emails in this space (greetings, getting to the point, staying positive, being taken seriously, etc.), my mind wanders for ways to improve. How can I make someone smile? How can I make my request easy to comprehend? Who should I include from the start to limit the amount of forwards and replies? Am I asking for something or requesting something be done? And, be it selfishly, conscientiously, or somewhere in between, I often think something along the lines of “what part of this email do I wish someone would copy?” How might I change the game?
Working with the phone (more so outgoing calls than incoming, due to my prior work experiences) has been a slightly more intimidating task for me than emails, and I believe that because of the difficulty I’ve grown more rapidly in this area. A combination of confidence, directness, and having a few helpful phrases up one’s sleeve, I’ve felt myself getting better at calling people (though I must admit, I don’t always value a phone call over an email the way some of my coworkers do), and the gratification for communicating in Spanish or English to a real, live person on the other line is quite often worth it.
Zoom so far has been the least frequent, least exciting, but in some ways the most comforting form of contact for me. The Zoom meetings in which I’ve been a partaker at this point have either been large seminars where I can take notes as if I’m in a lecture or very personal, small meetings, which feel as though I’m back in class or planning with a student org. I’m glad I only have a few of them, and at the same time I’m thankful for my Zooms, for the planned-out, “normal” meetings amidst a swirl of notifications and immediate answers.
Learning to communicate effectively within any new group is critical. I was somewhat surprised to see the many different ways communication could be achieved in my workplace, but I’m excited to know that there are even more options out there. The way we connect is always changing! (p.s. thank you for reading:))