Why Voice Is the Key to Effective Collaboration

Technology has given us the means to communicate in a variety of ways over great distances, both physical and metaphysical.

We can text and email, translate instantaneously and otherwise leap the barriers that time and space have traditionally thrown in the path of global enterprise.

This is especially significant in an economy which has demonstrated that the power of collaboration and cooperation exceeds that of going it alone. Even Apple, famous for its iconoclasm - and rich from it as well, has begun to partner with other organizations as the strategic imperatives have begun to change.

So the question then becomes how best to assure that all this communication achieves its goal, which is generally the futherance of institutional and personal objectives.

We have, as a society, appeared to vote with our thumbs in favor of the typewritten word. Why speak when you can text? We seem to appreciate the distance that lack of physical contact provides. It offers a sense of safety, perhaps inspired by the bewildering variety of changes we confront daily - and by the asymmetric threats we rarely seem to anticipate from even newer technologies or competitors,  from opportunities that didnt even have a name a short while ago. 

Research has shown repeatedly that email is a 'harsh' medium: it tends to amplify and accent that which we may not have wished, upon further reflection, to have emphasized. The result is often counterproductive both in terms of inadvertent offense given - and of lost time spent clearing up whatever misunderstanding may have ensued.

Trust, as the following article explains, is the key to effective communication which, in turn, is essential to collaboration. And the human voice just happens to be the best vehicle for establishing that degree of reassurance essential to cooperative endeavor. This realization is not merely theoretical: leading lights of technology have begun to recognize the opportunity both to improve performance - and to make use of underutilized devices to achieve this end. Amplifying the impact of the spoken word - what a concept. JL

Christopher Mims comments in the Wall Street Journal:

Teams that work in person are more effective than those that collaborate only over email, and the root of that effectiveness appears to be trust. The verbal and nonverbal cues humans have evolved over millions of years to read one another are essential to effective collaboration.

In life, perhaps nothing is more important than the means by which team members communicate with one another. Yet in my experience, this is often the least-developed part of a company's internal IT infrastructure.

These communications, which are not merely enabled but in some sense determined by the technology that carries them, are an important competitive advantage. They are one reason young companies disrupt older ones. And they are sometimes the difference between startups succeeding and failing.

Fortunately, a raft of startups are riding to the rescue of companies that have relied for too long on that trifecta of ad-hoc internal communication tools: phone calls, emails and text messages. Among the newest offerings is an iPhone-only (for now) app called Talko, and it's a unique, though not wholly original, combination of text messaging, phone calls, voice mails, and video and picture messaging.

Talko has an unusual pedigree: One of its founders is Ray Ozzie, who old IT hands will remember as the inventor of Lotus Notes, one of the first systems to allow email and chat-style messaging within a company. Talko is a project that one might say has been 40 years in the making. It dates to the mid-1970s, when Mr. Ozzie, as a student at the University of Illinois, used PLATO, one of the first systems to allow email and chat between computers. (Its chat function was called Talk-o-Matic, and Talko is an homage to that original, one-character-at-a-time chat system.)

Having seen Talko in action, here's what's compelling about it: Imagine a messaging app that also allows you to leave voice memos for others, and if they notice (because Talko sends them a push notification) lets them immediately jump on a call with you, as well as everyone else who is part of the group to which you were sending that voice memo. Talko archives everything, and it allows you to add hashtags to conversations (even tagging specific points in time within voice memos and conference calls), which means it creates a searchable record of everything a team is communicating.

There's a lot going on in Talko, and it's hard to understand how its functions could represent a breakthrough in business communications unless you're one of the 1% or so of people who are familiar with two other simmering megatrends in interpersonal and enterprise communications: Slack and Tango.

Slack is a group chat system that, like Talko, archives everything and is fully searchable. I was part of a team that got an early look at Slack, and I can say pretty definitively that when you're using it as part of a team for whom internal communication is of the utmost importance, as in a small startup, it's an accelerator of all the things startups need to survive: creativity, camaraderie and instant communication.

Slack has been growing quickly. Its chief executive, Stewart Butterfield, told me that Slack already has more than 200,000 daily active users—not bad for an enterprise startup that launched only seven months ago.

Tango, meanwhile, is a video, voice and text messaging app that, in its reach and ambition, looks as though it could be Facebook's  FB in Your Value Your Change Short position next outrageously huge acquisition. Launched five years ago, it has 250 million registered users and has taken $367 million in funding. Tango's app, in which users can leave each other voice and video messages as well as send texts and photos, very much resembles Talko's.

If Talko were merely an enterprise version of Tango, Tango's success would suggest Talko has a bright future indeed. Plenty of startups have made a mint building enterprise versions of popular consumer applications—think of Yammer, the enterprise version of Twitter, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion. And Tango is already being used by teams within companies, says Eric Setton, its chief technology officer and co-founder. Tango itself uses Tango to coordinate its team of 200 employees, who are spread across Silicon Valley, Beijing and Austin, Texas.

At the root of Tango's (and potentially Talko's) success is a trend toward richer digital communications between members of remote teams, and even between team members in the same office. WhatsApp may have been the belle of the ball just last year, with its $19 billion acquisition by Facebook, but as mobile devices become more sophisticated and the networks to which they're connected become faster, video and voice chat will allow for richer communication.

"There's something about hearing someone's voice," says Mr. Ozzie, of Talko. "One of the things I've learned over the years about collaboration is one of the most important elements is empathy."

Research has shown that teams that work in person are more effective than those that collaborate only over email, and the root of that effectiveness appears to be trust. Other research has shown that negotiations go better if two people have a phone conversation before they try to hash things out over email. Clearly, the verbal and nonverbal cues humans have evolved over millions of years to read one another are essential to effective collaboration.

I've found that one of the challenges of explaining to others why group communication tools like Slack and Talko are so effective is that there is no substitute for trying them, and trying them isn't something you can do alone. Fortunately, unlike Slack, Talko can be used with the original collaborative unit—the family. Many of the Talko beta testers I spoke with used it to stay connected with far-flung family members. Of course, Tango has been enabling this sort of communication for years. And collectively these tools aren't so much replacements for one another as potential members of a bigger and richer ensemble of communication channels.

"One thing I strongly believe is that we have many, many communication modalities," says Mr. Ozzie. "The answer is not one tool but finding the mix of tools that match what you want to do."

If you'd like to try Talko, it's available in Apple's app store now, and Android and Web versions are coming "soon," says a spokeswoman for the company. Meanwhile, I can't recommend Tango enough for connecting with family and Slack for teams that already have heavy internal communication.