So there’s this guy at work who apparently processes information verbally. That means that every time I send him an email, or reply to an email he sent me, he has to walk over to my desk or call me on the phone to have me explain what I just wrote. It drives me bonkers because sometimes he’ll call me three, four, five times to try to understand my answer to his question.
Admittedly this is a complex process that I was asked to hand over to him, and I have trouble sometimes knowing exactly what is the right thing to do. So talking it over isn’t an outrageous thing to want. But even for simple questions and answers, he doesn’t seem to understand the written word, so I have to tell him verbally what I just wrote. He’s a really nice guy, and does a good job for the most part. But he’s the kind who needs tasks explained in detail, step by step, and if he encounters anything unusual his brain falls over and he calls me.
I guess my question is how can a visual information processor (me) and a verbal information processor (him) find a place in the middle so we don’t kill each other?
My best solution for people like this: I write down instructions as I verbally explain them. (Or even better - he writes them down while I demonstrate a process, and we review the written notes for correctness afterward.) That way, he gets the information verbally, but we both have a written record to refer back to so that nothing is forgotten.
(a) If you’re not able to get him up to speed on the whole “reading for comprehension” part, you’ll have the email trail documenting what you sent to him that he couldn’t understand. However…
(b) There exists the possibility that your emails are truly non-understandable, and now your boss will know.
Either way, somebody will get better at the process of communication.
It’s pretty common, even among people who are literate. I had a long-term gig as a consultant at a niche retailer that wanted to build out into a bigger audience. So for four months I maintained their current programs while changing a few that I had direct control of. The rest needed process or financial approval from the owner. Over that time I sent a number of emails with precise requests for authority to do something, requests to buy this or that (often bulk purchases) and for specific feedback on something else. These all belonged in email because they contained a number of details (pricing, order numbers, website URLs, etc.) and because the owner was never in his office but somewhere in the loop of four sites… when he wasn’t just “out.”
So a series of small crises led to a rare sit-down meeting at which I was more or less continually chewed out for not accomplishing a string of things that were pending these answers, feedback, purchases, etc. When I pointed that out, he turned to his computer and started reading through something like 150 emails… all of which were surprises to him. “You should have just CALLED me!” he yelled. I then suddenly realized that that was a huge part of the problems I was called into help fix - no one could do anything without his approval, and he was only available in rare in-person moments, and by phone. His apparent inability to deal with anything but a realtime verbal conversation was choking the company to death.
I shook hands, said I wasn’t the person to fix the problems they had, and ended the relationship.
Well, you’ve seen my writing style here. Do I write cohesive and clear language?
I think my emails are for the most part, acceptable. Half of the time when he calls me it’s to say “I got your email, so you’re saying…” and he just rephrases what I wrote. It’s kind of like active listening with email. That’s the part that really drives me batty. I can understand calling to clear up something you don’t understand. But calling just to repeat back to me what I wrote…? WTF?
(And yes, the process is all clearly documented but he forgets to refer to it. I suspect that’s part of the same issue, where he needs to HEAR it, not read it. Would it be rude of me to suggest he read the documentation out loud to himself? )
I hear echoes of “101 Tips to Make You a More Effective Co-Worker” in the way he responds. Some people try to get over real or imagined limitations with programmed interaction.
That’s a tough situation. In your place, I ask him if there was a way I could present the information that would make it clearer and easier for him to understand. And I would let him know that it’s okay to ask questions, and that it’s better to ask questions than to do something wrong. But that it’s not good to be calling five times to keep asking about the same thing, so he also needs to learn how to take better notes or to listen better because I can’t be spending all my time explaining things to him.
Also, what is the rest of the office situation? Are there other people he can ask questions regarding how to do things? And how is he at taking instructions from other people?
I tend to be a bit of a jerk at times and this is one of them.
Email is a critical component of intra-corporate communications. I expect people to read them and be able to understand and work from them. So I’d probably be having a not very pleasant chat with him about his inability to read for comprehension and how important this is for his career, noting that my next discussion would be with his supervisor, but at no time does his inability to perform a key job function give him the right to stomp the fuck out of my time and the things I need to accomplish.
I assume he’s like that with everyone, but I don’t know for sure. I know that his coworker, who I also work with tends to roll her eyes when I bring up his name. She picked up the process quickly and is a smart cookie. Him, not so much.
That being said, I do get an insecure vibe from him, like he’s been smacked down for doing things wrong, so he asks for every little detail to ensure he does things right. The document I wrote for him included a few steps to copy a zipfile from email into a folder and unzipping it. He followed that precisely to the letter, and when I suggested alternatives, it thoroughly confused him. By that I mean really simple stuff like drag-and-drop versus mouse clicking through menus. It’s like he’s incapable or afraid to think for himself on the teensiest thing.
I was guessing that might have happened. That at some point he messed something up, was chewed out by someone, and now is paranoid about messing things up and so he asks too many questions, and is too scared to think for himself because he might think wrong and do something wrong.
I don’t know how you deal with someone who’s overcompensated like that, how you would get them back to a happy medium of doing their work and being careful with it, but not annoyingly overly careful and paranoid. Really it sounds like a discussion his boss needs to have with him.
My first thought was that maybe he can’t read. I knew someone that I’d bump into about 4 or 5 times a week. It was probably 10 years before I knew he couldn’t read. As Oak said, he was very good at covering it up. He’d come in with a list from his boss and say “I need [squints] geez, I can’t read his handwriting [keeps looking at it, shows it to me]” that would go on and then I’d try to read it and figure it out myself. Eventually I was clued in that he didn’t know how to read and as soon as I saw him I’d say “Hi John, gotta a list for me?”
Anyways…
This is what I’m thinking. I’m quite sure we’ve had plenty of “Everytime I do something at work, exactly like I’m told, I still get in trouble for doing it wrong” and I’ll bet if you dig one of those threads up the advice will be that the OP should go to the person who sent the email and say ‘so you want me to…’ or ‘Just to be clear…’ etc.
That’s what it sounds like he’s doing. Just trying to be absolutely 100% sure he’s doing everything just the way you want it done and making sure you can’t say ‘no, I’m sorry, what I MEANT to say was’ or ‘no no no, I thought you’d figure it out, I guess I should have explained it better’. Some people don’t realize that even though there getting everything done right, it’s annoying and they’ll end up losing their job over it since it slows them down and they can be replaced with someone a bit more autonomous.
Or, what Sam Lowery said. As for how to fix it, I’m not sure. It might just take a few times of waiting for him to come over explaining it to him again and saying ‘Yup, just like the email said, Frank, I know the message I sent you was pretty detailed and explained everything, why do you have to walk over here and confirm it all?’ and see what he says. If he gets sheepish, you might just be able to say ‘how about next time you just trying doing it right away and we’ll see how it goes’, if he gets defensive I might go with ‘then I’m going to have to send these projects to Adam instead I don’t always have time to explain them twice’.
I had a coworker that you could tell three things to and she’d do the first thing then come back and say ‘what do you want me to do next?’ and so on and so forth or she’d ask a question, I’d give her the answer and walk away mumbling to myself ‘it’s the same answer I gave you yesterday and the day before’. There’s 5 other people that have exactly the same job as her, they interact with me 5-10 times per day and she was calling me for help 30 times a day. For her I think it was a combination of making sure she wasn’t doing anything wrong but also making sure people knew what she was up to all the time (look at me, I’m still working on that list you gave me!). But like the example above, it got very annoying very quickly and people grew to resent it/her.
I had a boss a few years back who would send me an email, then he would call me up to tell me that he had just sent me an email, then he would proceed to read it to me, but really fast and mumbly, so that I could barely understand it. Luckily I had the email he sent me so that I could follow along!
So maybe you should try that JcWoman. As soon as you hit send, call him up and then read the email to him that you just sent. Sort of a pre-emptive strike.
