Thanks to technology, society has progressed to a stage where a time-traveller from the 1980s would hardly recognize the world today.
If you had told me back in 1988 that someday, we would sport handheld devices that could tell you where you were in the world, provide you access to every piece of information known to man, and be able to record voice, video and photographs, I would have shrugged my shoulders in disbelief.
Indeed, our progress has been remarkable, but the bigger question is, has our behaviour progressed as far as our technology has?
Let me highlight some complaints that I’ve received lately, from clients of mine who have had it up to their necks with bosses and colleagues whom they claim are ‘abusing’ WhatsApp! Let’s see if it annoys you as well.
1.He Sends Me After-Hours Messages – Can’t It Wait?
When I started work in 1997, an old boss of mine lamented that the biggest technological curse visited upon him was the invention of the mobile phone because “Now, my wife can reach me anytime she wants to”.
Today, the phrase ‘reaching out to touch someone’ is as easy as making a few swipes on your mobile phone. However, some bosses and colleagues may have taken this ease of communication a tad too far.
They use WhatsApp and other messaging platforms to stream their ideas, questions and requests to the team even after work hours and on weekends / holidays.
Now, I can understand if a late-night message was for a genuine emergency like “Help, the office is on fire!”, but a “Please send me this morning’s PowerPoint deck” one at 11.30pm is simply uncalled for.
Can’t it wait until tomorrow?
Just because you can reach me anytime of the day (or night) doesn’t mean you should. Let’s not normalize this behaviour.
What can you do about this?
I believe in the saying, “Don’t feed the troll.”
Trying to impress your boss who sends you a WhatsApp message at 2.00 am with a response at 2.01 am only serves to encourage more incursions into your personal time. In fact, you are actually giving him implicit permission to carry on with such negative behaviours.
If the matter isn’t urgent, don’t respond until you’re ready to do so.
2. She Leaves Me LONG Voice Messages On WhatsApp
The predecessor to WhatsApp was the SMS which was part of your mobile phone service. It was called the “Short Messaging Service” for a reason as it was limited to only 160 characters.
That is why it annoys people to no end when, instead of receiving a short text message on WhatsApp, they receive a 3-minute voice recording instead.
Yes, I understand that the sender probably saves a lot of time dictating into the phone instead of typing out sentences, but this is done at the expense of the recipient’s time having to listen to all 3 minutes of the sender’s message.
When someone sends a long voice message over WhatsApp, they’re basically telling the recipient that they are too lazy to type and that their time is more important. Period.
Yes, there are times when voice-messaging is justified, like when you need to send an urgent note when you are caught at a traffic light, but apart from that, I think any voice message over 20 seconds is inconsiderate.
What can you do about this?
I once received a 4-minute voice message which I (regretfully) played through to the end. Even at 2.0X playback speed, it was rambling, circumlocutory and could be easily summarized in two sentences.
The next time I received another voice-note from this person, I immediately responded with “I’m at a meeting now and can’t listen. Please send text message.” After a few similarly-themed responses, the sender caught my drift and stopped using me for dictation practice.
3. My Boss Video-Calls Me Without Notice
A female client of mine shared last week that her American boss has this bad habit of calling her directly on WhatsApp, on video mode!
“It’s okay when I’m at work, but in the evenings and weekends, instead of voice-calling me, he video-calls me at the most inopportune times, often when I look like I just wrestled a bear or when I’m in the messiest room in the house. It’s embarrassing.”
Truly, unscheduled video-calling is intrusive but thankfully, this is still uncommon in Singapore. Unfortunately, it seems be getting increasingly popular everywhere else.
What can you do about this?
Set boundaries!!
If you receive a videocall request when you’re not comfortable to be seen, you can either ignore or reject the call. Or just answer it but not in video-mode.
You don’t even need to explain to other party why the video camera is turned off and if you are asked, just give an excuse like ‘the lighting here is bad’ or a more honest ‘I’m not comfortable being on video at the moment.’
As much as I would like to say that WhatsApp is an evolving technology and users are also evolving their etiquette around it, it has been around since 2009 and it is time for us to start understanding the do’s and don’ts surrounding its usage.
We need to be more empathetic towards the person we are messaging and be aware of how our message, content, delivery method and timing could be better conveyed in a more a human manner.