today we are going to look at face to face versus online communication so let's check it out [Music] hello there and welcome back I'm Alex lion and this channel is all about helping you develop as a leader and we are in the second part of a two-part series on face to face and online communication the first video looks almost entirely at face to face communication and today we'll look at the similarities and differences and uses for these two types of communication in general so what do we mean by face to face well when we say
face to face we are mostly talking about one-on-one communication in the business we call this interpersonal communication essentially the communication that happens in personal relationships and family relationships or in one-on-one work relationships and really that takes up a huge part of our lives day to day so I'll briefly recap why I believe face-to-face communication is this standard form against which all other types of communication are judged so the bottom line is that it's the most complex it's the most complete we have all these variables to pay attention to at the same time so I love
it and it's the standard at the same time it doesn't mean face-to-face communication is always the superior choice it's not always the best approach that depends on what you are trying to accomplish so let's compare the two and see what type might be best for you given your specific situation and usually I emphasize things at work so most of the examples are at work so in the first video we talked about how face-to-face communication lends itself profoundly to the co-creation of meaning between people so communication does not simply transmit existing information from point A to
point B like through the telephone line that's one of the very old models of communication communication creates our relationships in real time this makes face-to-face interaction really good for complex tasks and so here are three examples of complex tasks that face-to-face communication is best at first the co-creation of something for example songwriting or other artistic endeavors essentially building new things together so yes you could send files back and forth and collaborate to write a song if you had to I guess but that would probably not work out very well over the long run to really
create something you have to spend some foundational time face-to-face I was just watching for example an interview with Paul McCartney from the Beatles and he was talking about how he and John Lennon wrote songs together and they would always be face to face share ideas and collaborate they weren't simply sending recordings back and forth so in most cases co-creating something is most effective when you're doing it face to face at least in the initial stages of creation now once you have a foundation established you could send files back and forth later perhaps the second way
that face-to-face communication is especially helpful is in connection building relationships with each other if you think about it you can't have a complete relationship if you don't spend time face-to-face together again especially in the beginning of the relationship or the time when the relationship gets real so face-to-face communication solidifies relationships and if you do happen to begin a relationship online like many of us do nowadays the real turning point is when you finally meet face-to-face and interact that in many ways seals or legitimizes the relationship it makes it real so in person you begin to
create shared experiences shared history and shared meaning and this is all very difficult to do if the relationship remains 100% on the third way where face-to-face communication really is super valuable is in collaborative problem-solving so building solutions through like brainstorming sessions so I talked a bit about this in the first video in this series but when you're face to face you come up with ideas that you would have never thought of separately so there's something almost magical about bouncing ideas back and forth in real time that creates something new so I was having a conversation
with my wife recently and we were trying to figure out what kinds of family activities that we can do together we're looking for fun for the whole family which is really challenging to do if you've ever experienced it and we were face-to-face and we brainstormed possible fun things that we could all do and make a MUP with some really great ideas and there's just no way we would have come up with so many interesting ideas so many possible solutions if we were just texting back and forth it would have ran out of gas it's just
not gonna happen in the same way you have to be there to bounce the ideas off of each other and hear yourself in light of the other person's point of view and then you can even combine ideas reach compromises it's very difficult to get those creative solutions if you're not face-to-face at least part of the time so face-to-face communication is especially important when creating something new and those initial stages of creation and working through those difficulties and once you have that foundation you can use more online communication but now let's turn to online communication and
it really leaves out most aspects of face-to-face communication because each type of online communication just takes a sliver of face to face so each of the common line technology online technologies were designed for a specific purpose and because of that they all have really clear shortcomings so it takes out a layer of the cake all the almost all the other layers of the cake that I mentioned in the first video and focuses in entirely on one or maybe two layers and so it leaves out quite a bit so email for example bites off one of
the smallest pieces of the face-to-face cake but it's still really important so email is great for transmitting large amounts of specific data in a moment like a large file detailed instructions in writing in a somewhat permanent way it's right there in text it's also great at sending invites or for appointments are putting things on your calendar again be because that information like the times and the dates they're very specific and so it's good for the routine transmission of already existing information from A to B information that hopefully doesn't require a lot of interpretation and emails
very fast you can just attach a document and click send of course in theory we could do a lot of this face-to-face but it'll be really time-consuming really labor-intensive and that's why we'll often say can you send me that on email cuz it's much more efficient but on the other side email tends to lead to a lot of misunderstandings and a lot of confusion about intentions of the other person it's not great at working through issues you can't hear tone you can't see facial expression we can't sense the other person's mood or sense of humor
and if we are already in a bad mood we will very likely read their email wrong right and once a conversation on email gets off track like this it's really hard to solve that misunderstanding if you stay on email you really have to get face to face as quickly as possible to work that out and the same goes for texting there's more back and forth but those limitations are still there next type of online communication is social media and it bites off a bigger piece of the cake more layers of the cake but it's still
not complete so social media is multimedia really there is the potential for video images audio text and so it's great for sharing parts of our lives with other people and the big advantage is that we can be very careful and creative about how we craft an interesting message it's great for marketing for that reason for essentially pushing out the best possible message it certainly does allow for potential interaction with others but that really there are two main criticisms to social media first it can lack authenticity messages are so carefully crafted that they can come across
as phony it's all just a show the second criticism is that people tend to react to social media any in a love it or hate it way so it seems like everything gets sorted into strongly agree or strongly disagree reactions there's no middle ground very little compromise on social media when we're interacting face-to-face though you have to look at the person in the eye you have to feel the potential awkwardness of saying something nasty and so you would hold back face to face in most cases but online we have trolls haters full-time critics about any
topic you could post a picture about your lawn the grass in your yard and somebody would say something about how there's a water shortage and you should be ashamed of yourself and the outrage that you have a green lawn but you wouldn't talk like that face-to-face in person people are more courteous in their conversations so next is video video takes an even bigger bite of the cake more layers because it has visual audio and you can add text through subtitles so videos great for example for general education purposes you can even make it live right
you can add chat to that so there's some interaction it can be much more dynamic than just one way video and if you're talking live on video you can adjust to the feedback that you're getting in the moment Facebook live is fun YouTube live is great but with live video you're still probably going to see the professional critics anytime I watch somebody live on YouTube there's always at least one person acting crazy in the chat section so you're still on these social media platforms that tend to split people into those extreme love it or hate
it camps and the people that are in the middle don't tend to comment so I think the best of the online types of communication is really one-to-one live video I love this it's challenging but using zoom or Skype or FaceTime to do one on one live video this comes the closest to face to face it bites off most of the layers of the cake but not all so I had a one-to-one call on video about six months ago to kick off a new working relationship it was an hour-long call and we covered a lot of
ground but it was enough to begin a working relationship to make a foundation and after that the emails and other online communication went really smoothly and it all worked out because we had created that relationship first live on one on one video now this is also the most challenging right people don't have a lot of experience doing these kinds of calls especially professionally and I believe part of that intimidation comes from the fact that it gets closest to face-to-face communication in other words it's one of the most demanding types of online communication because it has
so many layers of the cake that face-to-face communication has so that complexity makes it really valuable but also really challenging but if you can't meet face to face to create something to meet for the first time you're in different cities for example this can be a great substitute to face-to-face communication to make some progress and to move forward so in all I believe that face to face is the most complex and the most complete it's still the standard form that all the other types of communication try to imitate really but some types of online communication
are better choices depending on where you're trying to accomplish that's usually because they were designed for a specific use in mind like like email as we mention it's great for appointments and things but it's not great for discrimination the first video in this series looks entirely at face-to-face communication if you haven't checked that out yet I encourage you to do so I will put a link to that in the description below the video and that really looks at the different layers of face-to-face communication I'd also like to tell you about a resource a free PDF
download that I created on the essential professional communication skills that every working person should possess I'll put a link to that and that's all I have for you today thanks God bless and I will see you in the next video
