The key ideas

Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance

Erica Dhawan, 2021

A boss ends an email with a period, and an employee spends half the day wondering what they did wrong. Erica Dhawan examines how periods, pauses, emojis, copied recipients, and channel choices have replaced gestures and tone of voice, and why different people read the same message differently. She proposes four laws to help build trust at a distance.

Who it is for

For everyone who communicates frequently through chats, email, and video calls: employees and managers of remote and hybrid teams, as well as anyone made anxious by other people’s brief messages.

Reading carefully is the new listening. Writing clearly is the new empathy.

What the book is about

Jack, a middle manager, receives an email from his boss. The final sentence: “That will work.” With a period. Not an exclamation mark, but a period.

Jack rereads the email again and again: is the boss unhappy? Where is the mistake? Erica Dhawan tells this story in Digital Body Language, calling the period in such an email a “microbomb.” Why a single period can sting so much will become clear a little later.

Dhawan is a teamwork consultant. Her question is what happens to trust when we hardly see faces, communicating through emails, chats, and video calls instead. She organizes her answer into a model of four laws. This is the author’s practical framework, based on her work with companies, surveys, and other people’s research, rather than rigorous science. Ahead are periods, pauses, emojis, generations, and the moment when it is time simply to call.

Idea 1. Body language has not gone away

In person, we read someone through their face, voice, and posture. According to an estimate Dhawan cites, these nonverbal signals account for most face-to-face communication. They are absent in written exchanges, but the author believes other signals take their place.

Dhawan lists them. The choice of channel: email, chat, or a call. Punctuation, capital letters, emojis. Response speed. Who is copied and who is not. And how the name, address, and profile photo appear.

Recipients may read these details as posture and tone of voice. Jack read the period as a frown. Perhaps his boss simply ended the sentence in the usual way. But the email cannot tell you that, and for Dhawan this is the heart of the problem.

A colleague gives everyone detailed answers in the group chat, but sends you a brief “OK.” Most likely, they simply ran out of time, yet it feels as though they turned away.

Writing without a tone may be impossible: the reader will supply one. The only question is which tone they supply.

Read in Livria

About the author

Erica Dhawan is an American consultant and author of books on teamwork, and the founder of the consulting firm Cotential. She studied at the Wharton School, MIT Sloan, and Harvard Kennedy School. The Thinkers50 ranking called her the “Oprah of management thinkers.”

All books by this author: Erica Dhawan

Terms from the book

  • psychological safety
  • Digital body language: The author’s term for signals in written exchanges and online meetings that may be read like posture and tone of voice: channel choice, punctuation, emojis, response time, and copied recipients.
  • Digital natives: People who grew up with the internet and messaging apps. Dhawan observes that they may read punctuation and pauses differently. The distinction does not always correspond to age.
  • Digital adapters: Dhawan’s term for people who learned digital communication as adults; Livria renders it in Russian with a translated label. An author’s term rather than a scientific classification.
  • Three Ws: The author’s technique for work requests: a message should make clear who, what, and when.

All terms

Similar books