Timing Matters in Professional Communication: Here are three reasons why

Timing is critical in so many things. Buying a house. Investing in the stock market. Dating. And professional communication.

Timing isn’t just about luck like getting across the railroad tracks before an oncoming train. In communication, timing sends signals to other people about how prepared you are, how important the message or person is, and whether you can be trusted. 

Timing is directly related to credibility.

So it’s important to consider the effect of timing before we communicate and in how we respond to communication from others.

Here’s the thing: different methods of communication have different associated timing. 

Preparing a message

When we communicate face to face, we tend to be more forgiving of the specific language and sentence structure that people use because we understand that they are making it up right there on the spot and in the moment. But when we read written messages, we expect that the person took the time to use spell and grammar check so that their message could be easily understood by the reader. This is why spelling and grammar in writing affect perceptions of credibility: because people who don’t care about spelling and grammar might not care about you as a person or they might not have basic knowledge like spelling and grammar, which suggests they may not know other things.

Basically, face-to-face communication allows us to share ideas immediately (synchronously–we are interacting in real time) and that immediacy decreases the expectations for crafted (ie organized and grammatically-correct) language. 

While writing allows us to conduct business independently, each working on our own time (asynchronously–we are not interacting in real time). And the fact that we are each writing on our own time means that the reader expects that writing to be more carefully crafted–the ideas to be thought out, the organization to be deliberate, the language to be spellchecked, etc.

So one of the first considerations we have to make when making choices about communication is how long we have to prepare our message. Sometimes, as in face-to-face conversation, we simply don’t have time to prepare a message. A person asks us a question and is waiting right there for our response. We have to come up with something on the spot. Other times, we might be able to set up a meeting that we can practice and plan for so that we have a strategy for the conversation–but we could still end up with surprises during the face-to-face conversation. 

Writing takes time to prepare. Because the reader expects it to be crafted, we have to write out our ideas and then shape them and then check that the shape and content and grammar and everything else will make sense to the reader. Every time we write anything, we have to take a bit longer than anything we would say out loud. I mean, the signals from the brain literally have to travel a longer distance to get to our hands, so even a first draft of a message will take more time to write than to say out loud. 

Writing will always take longer to create than a face-to-face conversation.

The trade off is that so many of us are working remotely and internationally, so scheduling time to talk face-to-face can be just as challenging, in many cases more challenging, than writing a message. 

So it’s not that the actual conversation is longer than a written message. It’s that the set up to get a face-to-face conversation might take longer than the time it takes to write an email.

I also recognize that some people feel like face-to-face communication–particularly meetings–are longer than email messages. But, in my experience, that is not actually the case. Sure, meetings might take longer because there are more people, more ideas, and more social performance involved in arriving at the meeting and departing the meeting. Those interactions are part of building trust and connection with others, even if they are not directly related to the meeting content and outcomes. 

And whenever someone says “this could have been an email” what they are really saying is “I didn’t need to have any social interaction with any of you to do this task.” That may be true. But then, they are also saying that they don’t *want* to have any social interaction with any of you. And that means you can’t trust them. 

Face-to-face communication allows us to discuss complex ideas and read each other’s emotions. Business writing is not good for complicated stuff because most people aren’t reading emails carefully. The longer and more complicated the idea, the less people will read in an email. That’s why we have meetings: to discuss complicated ideas.

Business writing is also not good for signaling emotions. Because writing doesn’t have a body. It doesn’t have a face or a voice or posture or an immediate response to the words coming out of our mouths. It’s easier for us to understand emotions in face-to-face conversation because we get A LOT of information besides *what* the person is saying. 

In writing, we just get the words. And maybe some punctuation. 

This is why there are guidelines around how to use (or not use) periods in text messages. Periods are traditionally used to end sentences in messages with many sentences. But text messages tend to imitate spoken conversation, so they are full of fragments. When you put a period on a fragment, you suggest a complete thought, the end of something, the drop in pitch of the voice, and it sounds…mean.

In writing, it’s harder for us to convey emotion. Which is why writing at work is not recommended for emotional content. Like performance reviews or critical feedback or even rejecting a proposal or an idea. Sure, sometimes writing is the only channel we have–we just have this email address–but if we have options, we want to think about which ones are best for what purposes.

Face-to-face conversations are good for immediate responses to complicated or emotional content. Writing isn’t.

Writing is good for carefully crafting messages that are organized, grammatically correct, and part of the official record.

Waiting for a response

But because writing takes times and happens asynchronously, when we write, we have to be prepared to wait for a response. And that waiting can be torturous if we need or want an answer immediately. Expectations around response time for written messages have changed with our technology. 

Back before computers when people wrote letters to each other, they might wait weeks for a response. That seems unimaginable to us now! With the arrival of the smartphone, we are now all technically available all the time, so waiting a few minutes for a response to a text message can feel like an eternity.

The thing is that there are still times when we can’t or don’t want to be available. We put our phones on silent or do not disturb and focus on things immediately in front of us. It might be an event or performance, it might be a get-together with friends or family, it might be a work meeting or even a project that is taking all of your attention and you don’t want to be disturbed. 

Just because we *can* be reached at any moment doesn’t mean we should be available. 

Sure, if we send a text message, we expect a response quickly, typically within the day and more likely within the hour.

But every time we write, we should expect the response to take up to 24hrs. Because writing is asynchronous. Which means we don’t know what the other person is doing. And we can’t expect them to drop everything to text us back.

This is especially true with work email. When we send an email, we need to be willing to wait at least 24 hours for a response. Because not everyone has a job that allows them to answer their email at work, not everyone is at a computer. And even if you are at a computer and your job is related to email, you may have so many messages that you can’t get to them all in one day. 

The average professional fields 124 email messages every day. That’s too many! And the number is only increasing.

So, when we write, we have to be willing to wait. And to wait much longer for a response than would be appropriate face to face. 

Building trust with timely communication

Trust is built when people meet our expectations. Some of those expectations are unconscious or socially determined. For example, when a doctor wears a white coat, they match our image of a doctor, so we are more likely to trust them. Or when we meet a person for the first time and they offer to shake our hand, that matches our expectation of how we greet people when we don’t know them. Other expectations might be more overt and specific, like when someone gives us a deadline to complete a project and we deliver it on time. 

So, when people respond to our messages within our expected time frame, we are more likely to trust them.

When people take too long to respond, our trust in them tends to go down.

The thing is that people at work might have different expectations around reasonable response times. People who have jobs primarily in front of a computer might expect faster responses to their emails and chats because they are pretty much able to reply to messages as they come in. 

On the other hand, people who work out in the field or doing research or delivering training might have longer response times because their work is not in front of a computer and so responding to messages happens less frequently.

It’s important to keep in mind that the standard response time for writing is 24 hours. So, expecting someone to respond to your email the same day is generally unreasonable. If you need a response sooner than 24hrs, use a more immediate channel like calling. 

And if someone takes *more* than 24hrs, you are allowed to send another email if the message is really urgent. But try to be patient and generous with people. We all have so much going on. The fact that we *are* accessible doesn’t mean that responding to every message is *possible* or good for our well-being. 

One way to help people manage their response time is to provide a goal response time when you email them. If you put the “deadline” or goal date in the subject line and body of the message, people can organize their time more effectively. Once we know *when* someone needs a response by, we can better organize our own priorities to make that happen. 

Messages without a goal response time or suggested “deadline”--essentially, open-ended requests–tend to get lost and dropped and require more follow-up messages. Because if the reader doesn’t know *when* to get something done by, other things with clearer and more immediate deadlines will get done first and the open-ended thing gets lost.

Ultimately, timing matters. It matters in choosing *how* to communicate because you have to consider how much time you have to prepare your message and how long you can wait for a response. And it matters in building trust because how long you take to respond to a message will suggest to the other person how much or even whether you care about them and/or the message.