A quick word first
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Say you need a favor from a colleague at work. Maybe it’s their help on project you’re struggling with. Maybe it’s covering for you at an up-coming meeting. Or perhaps you’d like their feedback on a report you’re drafting.
Once upon a time, you’d simply walk down the hall and ask in person. But now there are many other faster options: an email, a text, or a phone message. They all may be more efficient timewise, but according to a recent HBR on line article those channels are much less like to get you the yes that you need.
Researchers Mahdi Roghanizad and Vanessa Bohns had subjects ask their real-world friends to proofread an essay they had written. Eighty percent of those who were asked in person agreed to help. By contrast, less than half (48%) of those contacted any other way volunteered to do so. That made the in-person approach 67% more effective than the alternatives taken as a whole.
In a follow-up study, Roghanizad and Bohns drilled down further and found that email requests succeeded only 30% of the time. Communicating by video or audio did somewhat better, succeeding in 55% of instances. Of course, that’s still a long way from the 80% success rate of in-person contact.
Why such a big difference? Prior research suggests that saying no, refusing a face-to-face request, makes many people uncomfortable. (It’s far easier to ghost an email.) The person being asked may feel cornered. It may not be your intention to squeeze them, but in effect an in-person ask is kind of a pressure tactic.
On the other side of that coin, most of us enjoy helping friends and colleagues. These days, doing some or all of our work remotely not only may make it harder for us to get the assistance we need, it also deprives us of the pleasure of looking someone in the eye and saying, “Sure! Glad to help.”