Humanize Remote Communications with RMail’s SideNote

Déjà Vu All Over Again

Are you getting the strange feeling like you’ve been here before? Like you’ve experienced exactly what’s happening now a year or maybe two years ago? If you’re a fan of The Matrix movie franchise, you’ll know that déjà vu is actually a glitch in the computer program that is feeding us our idea of reality. The ‘real’ reality (spoiler alert) is that we lost a war with intelligent machines we created who now use us humans as their batteries.

What’s going on now with the new Covid variant certainly isn’t as bleak, but it does feel like we’re all on a hamster wheel trying to adapt to a morphing reality that has us back to nearly the same place we were years ago. This new wave of Covid may, at least in the near term, halt what was expected to be a resurgence of in-person business meetings and conferences, and return-to-office plans have once again been postponed.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we offered our teams and customers subtle tips about the psychology of remote communications. Seeing as we’re in a not-too-dissimilar situation now, I thought we’d revisit some of these tips, but we’re not just going to do a lazy rehash here—we’re also going to show how RPost products launched over the last couple years will make these tips much easier to put into practice.

This Week’s Tip: Tame the Initial “Fight-or-Flight” Instinct (Using Emojis or other Personalized Communication)

More remote communication (still) means more emailing and videoconferencing. Without the human interaction of in-person client visits, in-office meetings, or in-person conferences, even a yellow animated emoji with a quasi-human face placed in context can initiate a favorable human bonding experience.😉

Here is (scientifically) why:

• • • Putting an emoji in the context of the first sentence of an email subconsciously puts the reader in a positive mindset before they process the message content, which helps guide their brain into interpreting the words they see with a more positive hue.
    • As we explained back in June 2020 (and without getting too deep into the science behind it), this emoji phenomenon has to do with simple cues that can release the right hormone in readers, ones that can provide a positive aura while their brain interprets the content of your email.
    • When you engage in a positive way, as Dr. Jonathan Silk, a decorated Army veteran, purple heart recipient, and CEO of business coaching firm, Bridge3 explains, the people you are virtually interacting with (e.g., reading your email, listening on a web meeting) benefit from a surge of oxytocin hormone levels, which is the neurotransmitter in their brain that supports bonding behavior and positive emotions associated with trust.
    • This simple emoji placement will therefore make readers more receptive to the message you are delivering by email.

So what specifically from RPost can provide a similar ‘emoji effect’? We’ve heard from customers who use RMail time and again that seeing the RMail Email Encrypted banner visible in their emails gives them peace-of-mind and confidence in knowing that their communications will be free from prying eyes.

Know more:

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There’s also RMail’s SideNote feature, which gives context up front to recipients copied on an email as to what to expect from the email or why they were copied. It’s basically like a personal sticky-note that offers an extra layer of explanation and can be as formal/informal as the sender wants. (It’s also no coincidence that the color of SideNote messages is a friendly, emoji-like yellow!) SideNote messages can help smooth over the edges of remote corporate communications and can have the effect in a remote world of a friendly, very human sidebar. I often use them to communicate praise and thanks to individuals on an otherwise dry work email chain.

Hopefully, the upcoming weeks will see more positive trends covid-wise, and we will be continuing this series so as to help our friends and customers navigate these strange times.

Feel free to contact us to discuss how RMail’s Email Encrypted banner and SideNote feature can humanize remote communications. Both are built into the free RMail for Outlook and RMail for Gmail apps.

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