You read that title and you’re still here?! Seriously?!

Here’s the deal, today’s workplace has so many different options available (mediums) to us for how to communicate with one another. However, the typical workforce is comprised of employees from different backgrounds and generations, so it might not be obvious to everyone when it is appropriate to use each communication tool.

For that reason, I did a bit of research and put together a sort of common knowledge approach to the subject. (If there’s something formally written on this that I’m not aware of, please let me know. Otherwise, if you’re looking for a great thesis idea, this might be it!) I formatted this into a few slides that were then used in a presentation about some new VoIP, IM and Cisco tools we were launching at the company.

We start by listing out major categories of communication mediums. These are then subjectively rated on their ability to be effective for the types of messages listed below (each is described in more detail beside it):

• Urgent Issues - Issues that require you to quickly get ahold of someone, communicate and arrive at an action plan.
• Complicated Issues - Topics that can not easily be summarized by a few sentences. Perhaps things like designing a new product or dealing with an intricate process.
• Presence Awareness - Messages that require others to be absorbing the message instantly. For example, a faxed message assumes a person will get to it within several hours, perhaps days. An instant message (IM) assumes the person is on-line and available to read that message within a few moments.
• Retention - The persistence of the message. For example, a phone conversation only stays around in the memory of the attendees whereas an email is documented until deleted.
• Conveying Content - All the visual and contextual information about a message. Gestures, intonations, etc.

My stab at a matrix to define this looks like:

So that does a good job of giving people something to think about when choosing what medium to use. You can simply think about the message you need to send and pick the best option. Designing that new product might be best done face-to-face and over the phone (which, arguably could be broken into their own segments - but the focus of this presentation was more on thinking about this topic in terms of technology enabled communication mediums) and asking Joe where you’re doing lunch today would be fine to do over IM.

But that’s only part of the picture. You also have attributes of the communication medium itself that play into the picture. Things like:

And those can be shown graphically on a chart that measures them using a subjective 1-100 score (or in this case, 1-120, but only so you can clearly see the items that hit “100″ on the chart). That might looks something like this:

So, since I’ve fallen asleep 12 times since I started typing this, I’ll stop. Regardless of if these graphics area dead-on or not, I think they’re at least something that is helpful to look at and think about for a moment. When I presented this, I had many people email me days later saying that the concept stuck with them and prompted them to change the medium they were using to communicate on a few topics.

I, being the clever guy I am, wrote back saying: and your decision to email me that comment was incredible appropriate as well.