Communication that doesn't make people fight "natural"

Hello,
the Best Effort
System Solutions Department.

It's April. Congratulations to all the new employees!
This is the most exciting time of year for me. The temperature is just right, and the environment is different, so it feels fresh.

Many new employees joined Beyond this year.
I want to do my best to welcome them and help them enjoy their work while interacting with their colleagues.

Speaking of communication, one thing I want to be conscious of this year is
"verbalization." This is a word that we hear often these days, but it is a very important part of communication, so I would like to be more conscious of this point.

In this article, I'd like to change things up a bit and write about
"Communication that doesn't make the 'obvious' a battle." I hope that it will be of some benefit to someone's perspective on work.

What is communication?

First, let's talk about communication.
This is one of our core values ​​at Beyond, and you probably hear it a lot. It's a word
like "communication skills," "lack of communication," "active communication," and "smooth communication," so
much so that we even have a term for it: "drinking communication."

As you know, communication can be translated as communication of intentions, but I understand it to mean conversations and actions taken to clarify and convey what is imagined

let's say
Person A says to Person B, " If you're not getting along with your coworkers, you need to communicate more Does it mean that you don't talk much with your coworkers? Or does it mean that you should invite them out for drinks? With just this, you don't know what to do, right?

The reason why people don't understand the meaning is because the definition of "communicating" differs from person to person .
Regardless of the word "communication," you need to be careful with words that have ambiguous definitions, and with words like "please be careful," "make it feel good," and "be more innovative," it's easier to convey your intention if you pair them with specific expressions.
(Japanese in particular is said to be a contextual language, and the meaning is conveyed even if you omit the subject, for example. Culturally, there is a strong tendency to "guess," and this can sometimes be a drawback.)

So, Mr. A might have been better off giving more specific advice (regardless of whether the content was good or bad) along the lines of, "If you're not getting along with your coworkers, then even if it's just for work, make sure to report and communicate verbally instead of via chat. I think it's also a good idea to make the effort to ask the person directly if there's anything you don't understand."

The content of communication varies from person to person

The importance of verbalization

If you have understood the gist of this article from the previous section, please read to the end

verbalization that I mentioned earlier .

Although verbalization is a simple term, I believe it is the "clarification of the image."

For example, let's say an alert goes off on the infrastructure side of the web server.
Person A asks Person B to take action and asks, "Can you check the logs?" So, what should Person B check?

Let's say that Person B, following instructions, checked the access log. He output the number of requests for the last 30 minutes. He reported this to Person A, who asked, "Is that all? Have you looked into it in more detail?" Does this mean that Person B did not investigate enough?
(Note: This conversation is fictional. In the real Beyond, we ask questions more gently.)

The answer is of course no

So how should you give instructions?

For example, if Mr. A wanted to know the number of requests, which methods were most popular, which destinations were most popular, whether the source IP addresses were consistent, etc., he should have simply said so. He might even have
wanted them to look at the system logs and the load balancer logs. Also, as the person receiving the instructions this time, he might have thought, "It's enough to just get the most recent number of requests from the access log."

Verbalization is a way to minimize discrepancies between the person communicating and the person receiving the message, and making this process more efficient is communication。

It can also be said that
communication is about eliminating the idea that "people should understand this much," and verbalization is about clarifying the image of "this much." No matter how much we may live in a culture where people are more likely to infer, we cannot see inside other people's heads.

Communication that doesn't make "obvious" a battle

This has gotten a little long, but here's the main point and summary

Do you all have your own ``normal'' things?

In other words, think of it as
individual standards that you think "this much is a given " In the workplace, it's like "meetings should begin five minutes early" or "calls from clients should be answered within one ring."

By the way, don't you think this varies from person to person? Some
people might join a web conference five minutes early, while others might join one minute early. For some people, being on time might be the standard.
Some people might think it's fine as long as they're on time, while others might get angry and say, "What a shame to not show up five minutes early!" In short, what is "normal" depends on the person.

As the title of this article suggests, it's pointless to pit these commonplace things against each other

However, just because people have different standards of what is natural does not mean that they should just leave things as they are.
That's why we need rules and explanations to help people understand.

There are means and methods to prevent each other's "common sense" from fighting over each other, and the name of these methods is verbalization and communication

I think communication failure occurs when something is not put into words, when the other person's assumptions are not overturned, or when there is insufficient understanding.
If you are requesting an investigation into an alert, you need to clearly communicate what is being investigated, where, to what extent, by when, and to whom a report needs to be sent.
Communication is important.

That's all, thank you for reading this far!

complete