A timely book. At the time of me reading this, it's been just a few years after the COVID pandemic send everyone to their homes, many working remote. As a result, our ability to communicate properly has dwindled. This is resulted in miss-communication, lost trust, and further disconnectedness.

Erica Dhawan's book: Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance addresses these issues.

The stories at the beginning of the book really help set the tone of the book, and truly highlight just how easy miss-communication is as we migrate from face-to-face communication and towards more digital "dialog". If we want to be understood respected and trusted, and promote more inclusiveness, especially in the workplace, we need to be conscious of how this new distributed, digital world effects us.

Emotional Intelligence

I appreciate her discussion on emotional intelligence. A concept that began as far back as the 90's. One concept about it is the ability to read other people's emotions properly, and respond to them. That was certainly much easier done prior to texting an emails. Today we need to make an effort to overcome those barriers, which includes not only understanding others, but ensuring we are understood. Along those lines, here's a quote from the book that's worth repeating:

The loss of nonverbal body clues is among the most over-looked reasons why employees feel so disengaged from others.

Defining "Digital Body Language"

The answer to these issues are what Dhawan refers to as "Digital Body Language." She defines that on page 10 as follows:

Digital Body Language offers a systematic approach to understanding the signs of the digital world just as we interpret those of the physical world. It will identify and explain the evolving norms and cues of digital communications within organizations, and in doing so it will help to create a set of common expectations for communicating, regardless of distance.

Emojis

I appreciated her treatment of emojis. I have to chuckle a little because at the time of writing this review (2023), emojis have only recently become a new 'norm', especially with young people. It was worth addressing in her book. She made some good points. Although older people see this as unnecessary, even a bit childish, the reality is that they definitely help supplement text with textual clues and context; those things missing in non-verbal face-to-face communication. In the years ahead, we will see these as such the norm, that not using them will make a person seem cold and impersonal.

Value Visibility

Chapter four of her book spells out the first of her "Four Laws of Digital Body Language" entitled "Value Visibility." Just the story at the beginning of the chapter was enough to drive a good point: With digital communication, it's very easy to miss understand how a co-worker is actually doing. My current job is in-office (as of 2023). However it will most likely be my last in-office job. Once I'm fully remote, I know I will need to take extra time to call, or better yet video chat with co-workers (especially as a team lead). There's far to big a risk of co-workers being left feeling disconnected and misunderstood.

This is very good read. I highly recoment it.