Intranets do not replace face-to-face communications

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According to a Harvard Business Review study of Project Management Best Practices in Global 500 Enterprises face-to-face meetings and interaction in the work place is declining rapidly

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3 thoughts on “Intranets do not replace face-to-face communications”

  1. Anonymous

    From a personal point of view I acknowledge your prediction of “better satisfaction when better relationships”. Thanks for your post.

  2. Anonymous

    Thanks for your post and reminding people that technology isn't the answering to everything. I agree that face-to-face will always be needed and if we forget that we WILL miss out.
    I also think there are ways we can better leverage the newer collaborative technologies. For example, the “test” you refer to talks to the correlation between “good relationships” and “face-to-face time”. It could be argued, that one seeks more 1-1 time because they have a good relationship. In other words if your boss was a 'jerk', you would purposefully avoid them.
    In any regards, let's assume that face-to-face leads to higher employee value. Why is that? Possibly a part of that is because of the stronger relationship that is built overtime priarily through informal communications. A genuinely concerned and interested boss can be a wonderful boss. Can you get that informal interaction without co-location? Would you send an “e-mail” to your boss or your team just saying “So how's the family?”… Likely not. That kind of communication typically happens through informal interaction…
    Enter the world of social networks (ala FaceBook), we are now creating webspaces purposefully designed to have no “agenda”. There is not topic heading. It's just an informal, on-going, virtual water cooler. Could this be used in a way to improve informal interaction and therefore relationships? Possibly.
    As I mentioned at the top, I do however that it will not be prefect and we still need face-to-face.
    If interested, here is a link to an article I wrote on this topics as well.
    http://rexsthoughtspot.blogspot.com/2007/04/collaboration-future-gartner-predicts.html

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