Can You Hear Me? How to Connect With People in a Virtual World

But the virtual world is here to stay, so how can we live and work in it successfully? How can we make the most of the benefits of technology, without succumbing to the pitfalls?

This book explains how. In "Can You Hear Me?" Nick Morgan argues that we need new guidelines for making contact in the virtual world, as individuals and organizations. He explains why we lose so much meaning and emotion when we communicate by text, email, phone, and video, and suggests ways to bring some of the feeling back. He highlights the importance of delivering a consistent message online, and offers tips on how to hold people's interest in specific situations, such as during teleconferences and webinars.

This book is especially relevant to CEOs, managers, and team leaders who need to communicate with remote workers online and host virtual meetings. If you ever sense colleagues are nodding off during your conference calls, you'll find it useful, too. And it's an essential handbook for anyone in charge of an organization's online branding or social media presence.

But we all send texts, emails, speak on the phone, and have an online footprint, so this book is for anyone who wants to make better connections in the virtual world – with friends, family members, prospective clients, or colleagues.

Author Nick Morgan is one of America's leading communication coaches. He's worked with the heads of Fortune 50 companies and prepared people to testify before Congress, appear on TV, and give TED talks. His blog reaches 100,000 readers per month and is syndicated across the web, and he frequently appears on CNN as an expert communicator. Morgan is also the author of "Give Your Speech, Change the World," "Power Cues," and "Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma."

So, keep listening to hear the difference between real and virtual communication, to learn how to write effective emails, and to hear how to keep people interested on a conference call.

"Can You Hear Me?" is divided into two sections. Part One sets out the problems of virtual communications, drawing on Morgan's personal experience, interviews with experts, and research into psychology and neuroscience. He points to the benefits of technology and the fact that it's not going away, but he mostly focuses on the dangers of moving so much of our interaction into the digital space. He talks of missed opportunities, fractured relationships, depression, isolation, and envy. The second part of the book offers some solutions to these problems, with lots of practical takeaways.

Let's start by taking a closer look at some of the challenges of virtual communication. Morgan highlights five main problems and writes a chapter on each. These are: lack of feedback; lack of empathy; lack of control; lack of emotion; and lack of connection and commitment.

Leaving lack of control aside for a moment, these problems all stem from the fact that virtual communication strips out emotion and doesn't allow for sensory experiences. We are social beings. We crave human interaction and emotional connection.

Because of this, our unconscious and our senses play a huge part in how we speak to one another. We pick up on body language, interpret facial expressions, detect other people's emotions, and respond to the sounds, noises and smells around us.

The virtual world deprives us of most of these sources of sensory information. We don't get the feedback we're used to getting, so our brains make things up – they remember past experiences, project into the future, and find reasons to feel tense and anxious.

So we imagine our boss's one-line email means she's angry with us, and we begin to think the worst. Whereas, if she were in the same room, we could use sensory data to work out her emotional state more accurately. How does she look and sound? Any misinterpretations can be cleared up quickly when we talk face to face. If we say something wrong, we can clarify or apologize.

It's harder to make real connections online, too, and more difficult to build trust – but it's very easy to shatter it. The virtual world is also terribly dull compared with the real world. This means attention spans are shorter – as short as 10 minutes, according to research Morgan cites. It's no wonder people fall asleep on conference calls and webinars.

To overcome these challenges, we need to make a special effort to bring emotion back into our virtual communications, Morgan says, and he offers suggestions for how to do this, which he expands on in Part Two.

One of his tips involves using emoticons or emojis to check in at the start of a team call, and to check out at the end. You could use the standard smiley face symbols or bring in your own system, asking people to color-code their mood – green meaning "all good," yellow to indicate they're having an average day, and red to convey they're stressed or that something's seriously wrong.

The problem of lack of control is a different issue. In the chapter on this, Morgan reminds us that we all have an online footprint, no matter how little we engage in social media. Try Googling your own name, for example. Would you be happy for a prospective employer to see what comes up? And what's the top item when you search for your company's name online?

Morgan has some good advice for individuals and organizations on how to build and manage an online persona or brand. Consistency of message is key, he says. He suggests writing a personal mission statement, or one for your organization, to post on a website or social media profile, clearly setting out your values and what you stand for. This puts you in charge of your online persona, rather than giving the power to others to build a picture of you from the snippets they find on the web.

We like the way the author sets out these problems with virtual communication at the start of the book, mixing up real-life anecdotes with hypothetical situations, in-depth research, and practical tips. The problems Morgan pinpoints overlap, and, because he devotes a whole chapter to each, there's a fair amount of repetition in Part One. This mostly serves to drive his ideas home, and it's easy to skim sections that seem repetitive. But he could have taken some of his own advice and written the first part of the book more concisely.

Let's now look at how to communicate effectively by email, which Morgan covers at the start of Part Two.

Email has got a bad rap over the years, and perhaps deservedly so. Our inboxes are flooded with messages, and we often feel overwhelmed by them. At work, we get copied in to scores of emails every day, and we drown in the backlog. But email isn't going away any time soon, so how can we use it more effectively?

Morgan starts off with some sound but obvious advice: don't use email to begin, repair, or end relationships; don't email your colleague pages of documents to read just minutes before an important meeting; make sure you think twice before you hit reply in haste and send something you'll later regret; and decide whether your message is better suited to another mode of communication.

He also advises against copying in scores of people, and suggests that we never write anything in an email that we don't want to see in the public domain. This is good practice, but something that's easy to forget.

If we decide that email is the right way to get our message across, the next step is to write clearly, concisely, and in a way that's easy to follow. Structure emails with bullet points, so the reader doesn't get lost in a long body of text. Use active verbs rather than passive ones, and cut out fillers, adverbs and adjectives.

Morgan suggests we aspire to what he calls "grace of expression," and communicate with authenticity, consistency, transparency, empathy, and connection.

The author also looks into email alternatives such as Google Hangouts and Slack, which is a team chat platform popular with tech companies. And he profiles a health marketing company that's using Slack with good results. This is useful, but risks dating the book, as specific apps and platforms come and go.

Emojis get another plug in the section on emails. Morgan accepts emoticons run the risk of seeming childish, but he says they do an important job of communicating feelings. We think emoji usage is down to personal choice or company policy – smiley faces aren't always appropriate in corporate communications.

So, while there's nothing groundbreaking in the chapter on emails, it's good to be reminded of some basic guidelines for written communication. And it helps to think about alternative channels, too, in case email is getting your employees down.

Let's now look at the dreaded conference call. With managers and team members often spread around the globe, conference calls are hard to avoid. Morgan doesn't recommend them – he advocates getting people together face to face as often as possible – but he recognizes they're essential for some businesses.

The problem is, they're often really dull. How many participants are actively engaged with the call, and how many are tidying their desk, browsing Amazon, or taking a nap? But there are ways to make conference calls more interesting, and Morgan has some great tips on bringing in more emotion and variety.

First, he suggests inviting someone into the room with you when you're presenting on a conference call. If you're speaking to a real person as well as the screen, you'll likely speak in a conversational tone, rather than slipping into deadly monotone or being too formal. And he suggests delivering your talk standing up, too, as this will help you speak with a more lively and varied tone.

His next idea is to bring in a master of ceremonies for the call – someone to run the conference, field questions, time speakers, and maybe summarize key points at regular intervals. This will give your call the feel of an actual event, and participants can be confident that the conference won't drag on or lose direction. The MC could also circulate an agenda in advance and gather feedback afterwards.

If you're not on video, remember to use your words to convey your emotion to replace visual clues. So, say you're excited about the new project, or you're sad you lost a client, and be effusive in your praise of your top team members. Be kind to your participants, accept their limited attention spans, and keep your teleconferences short – or give everyone regular breaks.

Another tip is to combine the real and the virtual to keep people engaged. You can't organize a volleyball match for your remote teams, but you can involve them in a shared activity. For example, you could give your team in Paris a puzzle to solve, or a gadget to assemble, and give the instructions to the team in New York. The teams need to work together over the virtual space to get a result.

We really like Morgan's ideas for livening up teleconferences, especially this last one. With a bit of creativity, businesses could come up with some fun activities to keep people engaged and help teams bond.

At the end of the book, Morgan looks to the future and asks some thought-provoking questions. What will virtual reality mean for how we communicate? What would happen if holograms replaced the need for travel? Will technology continue to isolate us, or can we make it work for us and our communities? He ends on a positive note, with a vision of how the online world could benefit us all.

This book has only a few minor downsides. As you heard earlier, there's some repetition in the first half, and we also think Morgan could have added more case studies, anecdotes and personal stories. The ones he does include work really well, adding color and variety, and bringing the author's theories to life. But there's room for more.

Besides those points, "Can You Hear Me?" is a timely and relevant book that'll get readers thinking about how to bring emotion back into virtual communications, and help them build an online persona or brand that inspires trust and has credibility.

Morgan is an expert in his field. He writes with experience and authority, and there are plenty of practical takeaways – neatly arranged in numbered lists within chapters, and in bullet points at the end of each chapter. So, if you want to communicate better in the virtual world and avoid misunderstandings, this book is an excellent guide.

"Can You Hear Me?" by Nick Morgan is published by Harvard Business Review Press.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.