Select your channel

You’ve completed your assessment of the context, audience, and purpose of your message. It’s time to select your channel, or the method you’ll use to communicate the message.

Should your message be a letter? A memo? An email? A text? A GIF? When is it appropriate to send a text message instead of an e-mail? When should you call someone or set up a meeting instead of e-mailing?

Each of these specific channels has its own appropriate uses, strengths, weaknesses, and expectations, which are summarized below.

By choosing the correct channel, you can save yourself many headaches and increase the chances that your message will be read, understood, and acted on in the way you intended.

Here are the key questions to ask yourself when determining which communication channel to use:

• Who is the audience?
• How important is the message?
• How confidential does this message need to be?
• How much interactivity (discussion, questions and answers, and other back-and-forth communication) will be needed?
• How much information needs to be included?

Many professionals make the mistake of sending an email when another channel (e.g., a phone or face-to-face conversation) would be more appropriate for the situation and the audience. For example, if you are a manager and have to respond to inappropriate behaviour in the workplace, the right thing to do is discuss it in person to avoid misunderstandings. You could follow up your conversation with an email summarizing an action plan that you reached in your discussion, but you would never deal with the situation by email alone.

Addressing sensitive situations exclusively by email (or, even worse, text message) can increase a conflict. Email or messaging can’t address how emotionally complex a difficult situation can be and usually results in awkward delays because of the time lag between responses. Tensions can also increase when people read too much into emails about sensitive topics, misinterpret the tone, and write angry or passive-aggressive ones in return. Recognizing that email is only one channel on a spectrum of other options will help you communicate effectively depending on the situation.

This principle is also demonstrated in ‘Anmol’s story’ through Anmol’s choice of email as his channel of communication. Since Anmol’s question was quite general and unspecific, it required some discussion and back-and-forth questions and answers for his Instructor to fully understand what was confusing him. Email is not an ideal channel for this type of interactive, problem-solving discussion. By choosing email as his channel, Anmol put unintended pressure on his Instructor to read his mind and guess at what he didn’t understand about his homework. His sense of urgency also put disrespectful pressure on his Instructor to respond immediately by email, a channel where senders should respectfully allow a minimum of one to two business days – often more – before expecting a reply. Since it isn’t appropriate in a college context for students to instant message their Instructor or to expect instant email replies, Anmol’s best strategy would have been to plan ahead and arrange an in-person discussion with his Instructor to have all of his questions and doubts clarified.

As ‘Anmol’s story’ shows, choosing your channel wisely can mean the difference between a message that is received and understood as intended (the goal of communication), and one that is lost in the noise or misunderstood in costly ways.