We are way too addicted to e-mail.

Project managers in IT often confront the tall hurdle of fostering smooth communication among team members separated by time and distance. It’s not easy. The IT project highway is strewn with failed and discarded projects that spun out from poor communications across widely distributed teams.

The challenge for a project manager is to develop for distributed teams a sense of presence that leverages new technologies with appropriate usage. Presence is one aspect – perhaps the biggest – of a team member’s engagement with the project team and its coordinated activity. Although e-mail supports an existing sense of presence, it is incapable of creating a sense of presence on its own.

Think of what “presence” means relative to the physical placement of a team of people working together toward a common goal. The best sense of presence exists in a team where the members are in the same place at the same time interacting face to face (e.g., a football team or a focus group). Close behind is the team that’s under one roof but in different locations (think cubicles). Then there’s the team where the members are in different buildings but the same postal code. The physical separation of teams can extend across multiple states, countries, and continents.

Contrary to what telephone ads say, long distance is simply not the next best thing to being there. To be successful, we need as much team presence as we can achieve, but we can’t achieve much when we’re so geographically separated. Well, presence is all about communication. If we look at the spectrum of presence in the team examples above, most person-to-person communication generally falls into two categories: synchronous and asychronous.

Synchronous communication occurs when people interact in a real-time dialogue. The obvious example is two people in the same room talking to each other. Direct telephone conversations are synchronous (although phone tag via voice mail is asychronous). Instant messaging (IM) and chat are synchronous, but with intriguing potential for latency (such as sending an instant message to somebody who gets it an hour later). Through high-tech telephony (e.g., Voice Over IP (VoIP)), IM, and chat, we’re experiencing new and diverse ways of increasing the information stream through the combination of visual and aural channels. Video-enhanced IM is an example of this, and so is the IM window that displays what songs you’re currently listening to while you’re chatting with somebody about your latest status report.

Asychronous communication, on the other hand, operates in bursts of one-sided dialogue. The most obvious example is e-mail. When I write you an e-mail message, I send it without knowing when you’ll read it or when (or if) you’ll respond to it. I generate it on my own time and terms, and you respond on your time and terms. This is good in a world in which we’re not all on the same schedule. Messages can be queued up, and the act of responding can be queued up as well. Before e-mail, the written memo was the primary example of communication asynchronicity. Another example of asychronized dialogue is the blog, which has the added backbeat of e-mail as well as blog comments to augment the layers of communication. Twitter and its corporate-friendly cousin Yammer are kind of a mash-up of IM, blogging, and e-mail.

Both synchronous and asychronous communications provide the means for people to be present to each other in varying degrees. Assuming we have all of these diverse, cool ways to communicate, what helps a team the most as it strives for its goal?

To me, it seems to come down to two things: bandwidth, and what I’ll call (for lack of a better term) appropriate messaging.

For this discussion, bandwidth refers to the potential range of information that can be communicated in the context of a particular exchange. Two people talking in person, face to face, is high-bandwidth communication. In addition to the actual words, each communicator can also parse intonation, facial expression, body language, and some of the more subtle signals (personal appearance, etc.). A two-way videoconference is high-bandwidth (although not as much as in-person) because it combines visual and aural richness. A telephone conversation is the next step down in bandwidth, eliminating the visual and some of the detail in the aural spectrum. (With cellphones, bandwidth shrinks even more because of the “Can-you-hear-me-now?” syndrome.)

Asynchronous communications generally have less bandwidth than synchronous, but not always. A video-mail message has greater bandwidth than a conventional e-mail message. But it has less bandwidth than a videoconference because the latter is synchronous and real-time, incorporating the immediate responses of all participants to the messages being conveyed. For all the ubiquity of e-mail in our working world, it surprises me how much people ignore the low-bandwidth nature of that means of communication. Without quirky visual add-ons like emoticons and “grin-dicators,” e-mail cannot convey emotion very well, or any of the other nuances that come through the visual and auditory aspects of higher-bandwidth exchanges. Nearly everybody has had at least one bad experience with misinterpreted humor in e-mail, and we all know the principle that major bad news should not be conveyed through e-mail.

Yet distributed work teams often rely heavily on e-mail as the medium of choice for most communications. Because of e-mail’s inherently limited bandwidth, this can mean real problems in overcoming the challenges of being physically distant. Without augmenting presence with other communication channels — in-person meetings, Twitter/Yammer, phone calls, IM, videoconferencing, etc. — a team can run amok in response to misfires, omissions, and the other slings and arrows of a limited medium.

However, the asychronous nature of e-mail is its saving grace. There are plenty of communications where e-mail is the best medium for the message. And that’s what I mean by “appropriate messaging”: Pick the right means for what you need to communicate.

• To exchange a lot of information in a short time, get everybody in the same room. (Get rid of the chairs beforehand if you want to keep the meeting short.)
• To ask a quick question, use IM or the pick up the phone. (It’s best to batch up your questions if you risk repeatedly interrupting somebody’s work.)
• To engage in a one-on-one dialogue with a geographically separate colleague, crank up the webcams to allow facial expressions and body language to increase the level of engagement.
• To make a specific statement for which an archival record is required (e.g., meeting minutes, meeting agenda), use e-mail.
• To conduct brief written dialogues with the whole team in order to convey status, progress, questions, issues, etc., check out Yammer, the internal microblogging platform that has grown increasingly popular in IT environments.

The presence to each other of distributed team members is enhanced less by the increase in the means of communication and more by the specific means they choose for conveying their messages. While it’s probably best to have the most high-bandwidth exchanges you can afford, it doesn’t mean lower-bandwidth communications aren’t useful as well.