Speaking and Communicating Podcast

I think that digital technology creates a kind of secret set of rules or rules of politeness or something in our organizations.

And just learning to pay attention to that in itself can give you some freedom and give you some mobility, some agency in your organization.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Upert and Leila.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning in to.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

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Now, let's get communicating.

Now, let's get communicating with Craig Mattson from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Hi, Craig.

Hello, hello.

It's cold in Grand Rapids.

I think it's 15 degrees.

Well, because their neighbors was Chicago.

Same here.

Yeah, just across the lake.

Right.

Welcome to the show.

So Craig is an organizational researcher who's a professor of communications at Kelvin University.

Today, we will discuss and lend his latest book, Digital Overwhelm, on how the research is done with gen Z's and millennials.

They are affected by, especially since COVID, with the online work from HomeSpace.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show again.

Hi, Craig.

Hello, Roberta.

I'm so grateful to be here.

I'm thankful that you're here.

Welcome.

Please introduce yourself to our listeners.

You name some of my talking points.

I am an organizational researcher.

I do teach courses in communication.

In fact, I have to finish a syllabus this afternoon or this evening for a public speaking class next week that I'm starting very on the edge of my seat about that.

I and my wife live in Grand Rapids.

We like to play pickleball and go for hikes.

And we have a very introverted Shih Tzu, a little dog named Chaucer.

And we try to take him for walks when it's cold.

He's pretty reluctant to leave the couch.

So I don't blame him.

Yeah.

So what is your professional background?

Have you always been in the academic communication space?

I have not.

No, I think for the first decade or so of my professional life, I was in broadcast radio, which now feels kind of outmoded in a world of podcasts.

But some people still listen to the radio.

So, yeah, I worked in radio for 10 years or so after college and kind of got a love of audio communication through doing that.

And then, yes, I taught at a Chicago-based liberal arts school for some 20 years and then just recently have transferred to Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

And when it comes to you being a professor of communications, what have you found are the generational differences when it comes?

You started in broadcast radio, so what have you seen have been the changes over the decades when it comes to communication?

I think there's been an assumption for a very long time that communication that's face to face is always and in every situation better and more real and more authentic somehow.

And I think with the rise of remote work and the increasing success of remote teams and their collaboration, we might be starting to see a switch in that.

I think we all still, we're human, we love to be together, we like the face to face so much, but I think we're beginning to see a shift and a realization that, no, like authentic communication is possible in just the way you and I are practicing it right now remotely across one of the Great Lakes.

So I think that's one shift that I've seen.

I do think generationally speaking, as a GenXer, I am someone who lived in the universe before the smartphone, and my students have not.

It looks like you also predated.

I'm almost 50, so yes, I grew up without a smartphone.

So we predate the smartphone, and that was such a cataclysm in interpersonal communication.

It changed so many, so many things.

And for students today, young people, especially in the Gen Z and now the Gen Alpha groups, like that's just as natural as wind and rain.

So that's another significant shift.

And it's funny when you say that about personal communication.

Was it George Bernard Shaw who said, the greatest illusion about communication is that it has taken place?

Yes.

The only thing we can be sure about communication is that we will miscommunicate at some point.

That is true.

That is true.

So what got you interested in doing this research with these younger generations, which then led you to writing the book, Digital Overwhelm?

I think I was curious about how alumni from my classes were doing in the world.

And so during COVID, not having a whole lot else to do, I started reaching out to people who were 10, 15 years out, sometimes just a year out, quite a range, and asking them, how are you dealing with all the intensities and the pressures and the stresses and the overwhelm of work today?

In having these kind of informal Zoom-based podcasts, didn't think anything was going to come of it.

I started to think like, wow, there's stories here are kind of incredible.

Then I opened up an IRB, applied to do the research formally through my college, and talked to some 47 Gen Z and millennial professionals, basically asking them that question.

How are you dealing?

How are you coping with the pressures and intensities of the early 2020s?

And what came out of that was a realization that a lot of what makes it pressurized is our digital spaces.

So that's where I sort of ended up.

Was COVID because of working from home, did that then add to this digital overwhelm and stress?

I think you're right.

I think it intensified it.

I think it also made apparent something that had been going on, but that maybe we hadn't really paid attention to.

We could sort of deal with it a little bit in the 2010s.

But I think COVID made it apparent like, oh my gosh, this is kind of a lot, as the kids would say.

Then on one hand, you have people who say, oh yeah, this is kind of a lot, which my generation and yours, yeah, we think, you know what, I didn't grow up with this.

I can take a break.

However, then you have people who say, I cannot live without my phone.

I cannot imagine not having a device on my hand.

What do you think that is about?

I think that word, overwhelm, has a sort of double valence to it, because overwhelm can feel good.

Overwhelm can also feel too much.

And I think we feel both those things about our technologies.

We're addicted to them because they do give us a burst of pleasure.

They give us joy, they give us energy, they give us something like caffeine or a sugar rush.

But we also, you know, we're seeing a sort of exodus among Gen Z from social media.

And I think they're saying, like, the overwhelm is not good.

We need to back away from this.

We need to touch grass and breathe a bit more freely.

I just think digital overwhelm is both a good and a bad.

It's good in certain small amounts.

It can be really energizing.

You can feel really productive and really fast moving and dramatic.

So it's got a double valence to it.

It feels energizing.

It can also feel deflating if it gets to be too much.

Yes, you mentioned productivity, which a lot of us do strive to feel productive by the end of the day.

And you think, you know what?

Oh yeah, I've spent my time wisely.

This is how productive I was.

And sometimes we do measure that by how much time did you spend in front of your computer.

So the question is, when you were doing this research, did you see any differences based on industry?

Or since COVID, everybody's just device, device, device?

I did hear an interviewee.

This wasn't during one of our formal interviews, but sometimes interviewees grow into being friends.

And I remember talking with one of my interviewees about screen time, and she commented that for us, it might be something like smoking was for people in the 60s.

Like we have a vague sense that it's not good for us, but the research hasn't been done.

We don't have the longitudinal studies of what the effect is, of just staring at so many screens for so much of our lives.

I really don't have a definitive word on that.

Myself, I'm not particularly worried about it, but it sometimes does give me pause.

We are kind of screen heavy.

And sometimes even in the presence of people, I mean, back to us having grown in a generation where there were no cell phones.

So we know how to interact with people without the presence of a device.

We know how to pay attention to them.

But now I can sit with someone and in front of me at a restaurant, they're on their phone and they're not even looking at me because this is how they've grown up.

This is all they've known.

So then the question becomes, how do I have that level of understanding for them?

But at the same time, remember that, you know what?

Like for instance, I don't want notifications if I sign up for a new app, because I only say to myself, I want to decide when I go into a device.

I don't want it to call me.

I will call it when I think, okay, you know what?

I haven't seen my phone all day or I haven't checked my social media all day.

So how do we find that happy medium?

Because we don't, as GenXers, want to sound judgmental, so to speak.

I don't have an easy answer for that one, Roberta.

I wish I did.

I think I could make a lot more money than I'm making right now if I could quickly and just, you know, sort of effortlessly answer that.

It's a struggle, isn't it?

I mean, it feels like something that we wax and wane on.

I feel like sometimes I'm able to sort of peel away from my screens.

Just yesterday, I was working on a writing project, and I set a little goal for myself.

It was 9 in the morning.

It's like, I'm not going to look at my phone or my computer during this 3-hour period.

I just want to write longhand in my journal and see if I can come up with some good ideas for this book I'm working on.

You know, my brain sort of unfolded and freed itself, and I wasn't sort of doing that little three-finger flick you do on your mouse, keypad on a Macbook to see what all your notifications are.

It was just me, a pen, and a page.

And there was something really freeing about that.

But once that three-hour period was up, I'm back to my old habits.

So I think it's unfortunate that the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world are designing algorithms that harvest our attention, and it is very difficult to resist that on an individual basis.

I think there's some hope in collaboration and in community and trying to do this resistance to the attention economy with other people, but it's a tough one.

They do certainly say that attention is the new currency.

It's the ultimate drug now.

You know, before, some people wanted to be famous.

Some people wanted money, but now attention is the ultimate drug.

Now, let's talk about your book, Digital Overwhelm.

You say there are six modes of communication.

Would you like to walk us through those?

Yes.

These are things I heard people talking about.

They were also informed by communication theory.

So I had some of these concepts in my head as I was talking to people, but I definitely heard them.

The first mode that I talked about was a mode of sending or dissemination.

It's a little bit like a farmer scattering seeds on a field by hand.

You're sending something out.

The second mode was dialogue or conversation.

You're talking just like you and I are doing right now.

Then a third mode would be a mode of signaling things, where maybe you're saying less, but you're signaling, maybe non-verbally, or maybe in fewer words, you're indicating that something's the case.

I also looked at a tacit mode, which is where things are completely unspoken.

You just know more than you can say.

And then I also looked at an advocacy mode, where you're trying to persuade people.

A semiotic mode, which has to do with like what things mean.

Using language or symbols to mean something.

The reason I laid out all of these six modes is not because it particularly matters that anybody remembers them all, but simply they give you a sort of grid for like looking at your communicational life and thinking about it with sort of distinct categories.

Okay, right now, I'm sending things.

That's what I'm trying to do.

Or right now, we're trying to have this conversation.

And with every mode, there are these possibilities that open up, and then there are limitations to it as well.

And so I found that thinking about each approach to communication allowed you to think about those opportunities and those limitations more carefully.

Does that help?

It does.

It makes me think of what you said about email communication, which is authentically communicate as you send an email as you.

What did you mean by that?

Because I think back to the question we had about generational differences in communication, the e-mails I used to send when I started working are very different from e-mails now.

Oh, I would love to hear about that.

What's been the shift?

Meaning it was more formal back then.

So instead of saying, Hi Craig, which is what we do now, we say Dear Mr.

Mattson or Dear Craig, if you've given me the permission to use the first name.

And then it would be attached, please find or as per our telephonic conversation.

No, everything is just formal language.

And now it has become a little more relaxed.

Yes, I think so.

At least some of the time, right?

There are probably moments when you revert to that formality.

You make use of a more careful, maybe because you don't know the person you're writing to or because they're very important or something.

And then maybe if you have a partner or a good friend or a bestie, you just sort of send them an email that almost reads like a text.

Don't forget the stamps with no signature or something like that.

So yeah, I don't think that we can legislate how emails should sound.

But I tried to suggest in my book that you should at least think about how your emails sound.

And I used a metaphor of voice for that.

So think about the voicing of your emails.

Think about their volume.

A really obvious example of writing in all caps is shouting at somebody.

So think about their volume.

Think about pitch.

Think about their tone.

Think about their rate.

We think about and practice all of those things when we speak to one another.

Like when we say, slow down, I can't understand you.

We're thinking about rate.

And I think in a similar way when we're writing emails, it can help us to just think that you want to write an email the way you talk.

So I use that term authenticity because I think some of the time, maybe much of the time, we should be trying to speak through our emails human to human and not turn ourselves into little machines that are just sort of spitting things at one another.

Yes.

Hence my question.

When you say be authentically you, meaning if that's how you would sound when you speak, that's how the email will be.

And in being authentically, do you then consider how the other person, especially if you're not as familiar with them, how they would receive?

Because one of the roles we say the emojis play is that they give more tone to what you're saying because a lot of lost in translation when it comes to language is that they give tone.

So if you sound too serious and then you put a smiley face at the end and you know that Craig knows I'm not angry.

I just need this to get to and you know what I mean.

Yes, the emoji has saved many a marriage, I suspect, and many a friendship.

One can only hope.

Yeah, I mean, I think humans got a human.

We got we find ways to connect.

We find ways to qualify.

We find ways to voice ourselves as, you know, more or less authentically.

And the emoji is one of those ways.

And I think sometimes grammar allows us to do that.

The style of our writing and emails, the subject line, even sometimes just the time of day you're sending it communicates something.

I read somewhere, I think this was an Anne Helen Peterson.

She was talking about email signature lines and just saying like, I know that life is really complicated and you may be receiving this email at a time that isn't perfectly fitting for a response.

Take your time.

So I think giving each other grace is another way to make room for that sort of authentic communication.

And speaking of timing, back to digital overwhelm, another reason that technology has given us the stress and burnout and all these trends is because we have technology with us, it seems like we've moved away from having a cut off of now I'm done with work, time to focus on my family.

It's 5 p.m.

So people send emails at 10 p.m.

because the device is always there.

Yeah.

Yes.

You have put your finger on a difficult point in work culture today, and that is that work culture is not bounded in the building, it just goes with you wherever you are.

And something I noticed among Gen Z and millennial professionals was that there was a little bit more insistence that there be a cut-off point.

Like, I'm going to work till 5, and then that's what you get.

Like, I'm going to turn off my devices and put away my laptops.

That's more discipline than I practice myself, but I can respect it.

It's sometimes needed.

It is.

But then the question is, we talk about leadership as well.

Do leaders respond to those, not demands, but to those requests of, I know that in the last few decades, you know, now that we have technology, you can work as much as you need to and beyond work hours.

But after 5 p.m., can I focus on, does that work and lead us receptive to that?

Or does it put you at a disadvantage, so to speak, in your career?

I think it can.

And that's an uncomfortable truth.

I think it can.

And that's a dance that rising professionals have to manage somehow.

I think it's unfair that we put this on them.

But, yeah, I think that there can be these expectations that you have to kind of decode and figure out in your company, like, what's the culture like here?

What are the expectations?

What are the unspoken rules?

Yeah, that's tricky.

That's no fun.

I think the more frank that leaders can be, like, here's what I expect when I send an email, or when I text you at such and such a time.

The more direct we can be, the better.

And I will say that on the other end of things, like, leaders may find that making themselves digitally available to their workers can be a little bit like open office hours, or it can be a little bit like a way to flatten the hierarchy and create a little bit more encounter.

I realize that that's a thing you'd have to practice with discernment and with judiciousness, but I think it works both ways.

So there are some possibilities there.

Which means they can set the tone and have, like I said, collaboration and have a mutual understanding of what those parameters are.

Do you have any stories you can share with us from your research as a GenXer that were very eye-opening for you or you had made assumptions about the younger professionals and that made you realize, oh, wait a minute, I didn't know that.

Yes, I think so.

One story that comes to mind is of a woman professional.

She taught me a lot.

I remember that interview as being, to use your phrase, a particularly eye-opening one, because she said that her work didn't mean anything to her.

And I felt jolted by that because to me, work is very much a source of purpose, and I do have a sense of meaning in it and significance.

I get a lot of energy from the work.

But for her, it was pretty important to say that work was not a source of meaning.

And I think that was somewhat because she had undergone a religious deconstruction and was no longer a person of faith.

And so to talk about meaning sort of implied something religious about work that she really didn't want to embrace and didn't really find helpful at all.

I think it was also just like a declaration of independence.

Like I am more than my job.

I'm not going to give that to work, to say that it's a source of meaning for me.

It's just a thing I do because I got to do it.

And she wasn't a bitter or cynical person.

And as far as I could tell, she seemed to enjoy her work.

But that was sort of eye-opening for me as a Gen Xer, listening to a millennial talk, sort of a post-Great Recession millennial, just thinking about work in a way that was different from the way I thought about it.

Right.

I find that compared to us, at least they have a lot more freedom with regards to those topics.

And I wonder if having more options compared to what we had when we started our professional journeys is the reason that they have a different perspective from us when looking at work.

I like your theory because it does highlight the role that technology has really shifted things in what we call the knowledge economy.

Today, there are just so many different kinds of jobs one could have with so much more mobility and flexibility to them that when I was getting out of college, I was like, well, do I want to be a teacher?

Do I want to be a radio broadcaster?

It felt like there was a limit to what I could do and what kind of job.

I was working for a swimming pool construction company during college, and it was not a paradise of flexibility by any means.

So I think your theory is right.

I think I would add to the theory by saying that it seems like Gen Z folk today have experienced the pandemic, they've experienced a profound, I'm talking about especially in the United States, racial polarization, racial upheaval, racial reckoning.

They've also experienced a lot of breakdown in mainstream institutions that just haven't been behaving well and really haven't taken care of people.

So, they do have a little bit of a castaway feeling.

They're just like, okay, I'm marooned here in late modern society, and I got to watch out for myself because my manager's not going to watch out for me.

My corporation's not going to watch out for me.

And as the beautiful book title has it, work is not going to love you back.

So, I think that's also a feature in what's going on today for the younger rising generation.

That's definitely true.

Yeah, and I feel that more than anything compared to us at least, they are very outspoken, but they desire us.

There's just a lot of differences because of technology and the availabilities that it comes with.

And so, that's why for them, work means different things than it did for us when we started working in the 90s.

It sure does.

You spoke about Zoom meetings.

What have you found with some of these challenges that the young professionals have when it comes to Zoom meetings?

Because, you know, some leaders that we've spoken to say, oh, people are not engaged, or there's too many of my team members on the screen.

I don't know who to pick and who to just know that they were there, but they participate and things like that.

But what did the younger professionals say were their challenges when it comes to Zoom meetings, especially since COVID?

Yes.

I think one of the challenges was trying to figure out, especially if they were a new hire, what their managers actually wanted, what their managers actually cared about, especially if you got hired into a start-up or into maybe a really busy non-profit that's just trying to hold itself together with chicken wire.

It can be really challenging to figure out your role.

Just out of college, or let's say you're 29 and you're pretty seasoned actually, but just coming into a new company culture and having to figure out the whole thing by looking through the keyhole of a Zoom lens, that's hard.

That's really hard.

You know, when you switch modes and you move from the Zoom meeting to email or to text, sometimes that does not bring clarity.

I remember an interviewee telling me that she read an email and thought, oh, they must be joking.

That's funny.

Ha ha.

And then they got on the meeting and looked at the person's face and said, oh, they're not joking.

They are deadly serious.

There was no laughing emoji there.

No.

Yes, exactly.

So that's some of the challenges that I was hearing.

Again, the miscommunication, because there's just so much that digitally gets lost in translation, miscommunication.

Again, let's bring the cultural differences aspect in it.

Corporations are more global now, because everything's on Zoom.

We got people in different continents.

Cultures communicate differently.

And if a corporation is US-based, mostly US team members, but you have someone from Asia, from an African country, we find that usually, it's not only the case, but usually, what tends to happen is Americans are just sensitized to the whole idea of I speak up.

You know, if I've got something to say, I'm going to click the raise hand and my boss will say, Craig, it's your turn, and you speak up without anyone calling on you.

Whereas I taught English in South Korea, and unless spoken to, usually, they don't speak up, just culturally.

Obviously, some individuals are different.

So if they work for an American corporation, what should the leaders be aware of?

What initiative should they take in order to include them?

Because they're not going to just say, Click, raise hand.

I want to say something.

That's a great question.

That's a layered question, isn't it?

Because I can see three layers to the question.

There's the first layer of just the information you're trying to get across.

Sometimes that's hard enough to communicate.

Here's where you need to be.

Here's what you need to do.

Here's what the deliverable is.

Then the second layer is the digital that we've been talking about mostly.

That is how we negotiate the tech.

And then a third layer that you've put on top of that is the cultural.

And each of those layers has a different set of norms and expectations and rules and principles.

And it's just tricky to move from layer to layer.

Sometimes you're just trying to communicate information, and one of the rules of communicating information in that first layer would simply be as brief and as efficient and as straightforward as you can.

I'm just trying to tell you this thing.

But in the digital space, there might be rules that go along.

I'm saying rules in quotation marks, because maybe nobody has a manual on this.

But there might be expectations.

If I send you an email, I want you to respond very, very quickly.

Whereas if I say, give me a call, there might be a bit more leeway in that.

So in the digital space, there are these rules and expectations that we often don't talk about.

Can I be playful in this Zoom meeting?

Can I joke around in my email with my boss?

Is it okay to text my supervisor if I happen to have her number and so forth?

Those are the sorts of rules in that second layer.

And then the third layer is one that you've raised, which is the intercultural.

And there, again, we have this profound formations, like things that were passed down to us from our parents and our grandparents, and in our churches and in our schools and so forth.

And there are all these expectations and norms that go along with that.

Like, you don't speak up in meetings unless somebody calls on you.

Or, you do speak up in meetings because that's the only way you're going to get your ideas out there and get noticed.

So, I think today work feels intense because there are all these layers.

I think I'd be the last person to say, here is the rule book on how to negotiate all of that.

I hope that in a given work culture, there's room and grace to say, here's how we do things around here.

Then, for you, if you are from another culture, or if you are unfamiliar with the medium, or you just negotiate information and relationships differently, you can say, oh, okay, like that's how you do things around here.

I'll work with that.

Or I'll push against it, but I'll kind of work with it, too.

So, that's a really tricky thing.

My book was simply trying to help people to understand those layers.

Like, it's easy to just be rushing through the day, trying to get your stuff done, wondering why this is so frustrating.

And I think it's helpful to have that communication lens like your podcast offers.

We can say, okay, here's what's going on here.

Like, they're working with a different set of communication rules than I am, or they have a different set of communication expectations than I do.

That can just give you room to breathe a bit and say, okay, let's try this again.

If that's how you explain it, Craig, I'm wondering, you know, back in our generation, we used to have induction for about, I don't know, how many weeks a month, let's say, of you are new to the job, they're just going to show you around how things are done.

So if somebody right now is asking, do I text my boss?

Were they not inducted into how you communicate?

Or were they not even shown that, okay, if it's an email pertaining to this, you can wait until a certain time to text or send an email.

Or if the issue pertains to the, or if it's not urgent, you can wait until you meet at the Zoom meeting tomorrow.

They not have those types of systems anymore.

Well, yeah, we're talking about on-boarding, I guess.

Yes.

And you know.

Yeah.

I've also heard scholars refer to it as like organizational assimilation, where you assimilate somebody to the work culture that you're in.

I don't know if I would say nobody's doing that today.

I think it gets done.

It's just sort of maybe it's uneven.

Sometimes when we do that, there's just so much to say because a work culture is a complicated thing.

And so you got to choose what you're going to say.

After this podcast conversation with you, Roberta, I'm thinking maybe we should say a bit more about our digital expectations.

You know, I think that would be a real gift to people who are coming into our companies or our nonprofits or our places of work.

Can you imagine how much anxiety it builds if you think they were joking and you come to the Zoom meeting and they're not joking?

Just know ahead what's going on because you've been onboarded.

You know the rules.

If you communicate on Slack about something or a certain topic or the project, those things at least have some kind of workbook manual for people to know how to conduct themselves.

Yeah.

Yeah, that would be good.

I don't know if you saw the leaked memo from MrBeast, the YouTube influencer.

He's a Gen Z guy and kind of a wild character, but he wrote an informal manual in which he said, like, here's how we do things in regards to email.

Here's how we do things with communication between bosses and employees or, you know, higher ups and the team.

Certainly, I felt uncomfortable with some of the suggestions, but I thought it's good that he's making that clear and transparent.

We should do that more often.

Clarity.

See, communication has taken place.

Anything that you were hoping I would ask you, Craig, or you shared in your book, you were hoping the listeners will get some information from?

No, I think this has been a pretty wide-ranging chat.

I'm really grateful, Roberta, for you raising all the modes of communication and the value in learning to switch among your modes, not getting stuck in a particular mode.

The only one that we really didn't get a chance to talk about is advocacy.

And I think advocacy is something that's also challenging for any person in an organization.

I recently switched organizations, and I moved into an institution where basically nobody knew me.

And I suddenly found myself as a middle-aged white guy, suddenly found myself having to advocate for myself.

And I was like, wow, I don't have any social capital here.

Nobody knows me.

I think I might have something to contribute to this.

So I got to speak up and I got to advocate for myself.

It kind of felt like I was 19 again.

So it was actually good for me to not just assume that people around me knew, but to practice that sort of advocacy.

But I did find that when we advocate in our organizations, we sometimes have to advocate upward to the people who manage us.

We have to advocate outward to the people who we work with.

But you know, one of the hardest is advocating inward.

And that is persuading ourselves that what we have to offer here is actually a gift.

You know, sometimes you have to convince yourself of that.

When you say that, you just reminded me, I wanted to ask the research you've done with these professionals, do they find that quite a number of them at least have mentors when they enter the workplace?

Or are they just in the dark trying to find their way, trying to navigate this new space?

Deborah Heiser has recently, she's published a book called The Mentorship Edge.

And she talks about that really helpfully, I found, because corporations aren't entirely sure what to do about mentoring.

It's this thing that kind of has to happen organically.

The mentor and the mentee both have to have this kind of magical connection, where they feel like one has something to offer to the other.

I would say, though, in response to your question, I don't know if a lot of my people felt like they had those mentors.

Yeah, I'd like to go back to the data on that, but my impression was that loneliness was more common than mentorship.

The workplace today feels more lonely than it does full of mentors.

Wow.

That's something to change, isn't it?

It really does.

It really does, especially because we talk about soft skills, which are people skills, and for it to be lonely now, then I don't think a lot of us back then felt that way.

So hopefully, that changes.

Any last words of wisdom, anything that you feel the reason the listeners should pick up the book, Digital Overwhelm, this is the best value they will get out of it.

Anything that you feel that they need to remember or need to change, as we said.

I think that digital technology creates a kind of secret set of rules or rules of politeness or something in our organizations.

And just learning to pay attention to that in itself, can give you some freedom and give you some mobility, some agency in your organization.

So, I think my book helps you to notice what the digital is doing in your org.

And then it also offers you some workshops for ways to navigate the digital better with your co-workers.

Navigate the digital world better.

Words of wisdom from Craig Mattson, the professor at Calvin University of Communications.

My absolute pleasure, Craig.

Is there somewhere our listeners can reach you if they would like to find out more?

Yes, you can reach me at The Mode Switch.

The Mode Switch.

All one word.com.

themodeswitch.com for Craig Mattson, the author of Digital Overwhelm.

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