A manager sends a short message asking to discuss a deployment. The recipient reads it as criticism and spends the afternoon preparing a defence. The manager intended to ask about an unresolved dependency. A brief exchange could clarify the issue, but neither person initially knows how the other has interpreted it.
Text can leave tone and purpose ambiguous. Face-to-face interaction can add useful information, but a facial expression or confident manner does not guarantee accurate understanding either. Communication depends on what is expressed, what is inferred, what is checked, and whether people can speak candidly.
Empathy is relevant to that process, but it is not a single faculty that disappears when a camera is turned off. Research distinguishes sharing another person’s feelings, understanding their perspective, accurately estimating their experience, and feeling concern. Those capacities can relate to one another while producing different outcomes in the same interaction.
Separate Feeling With Someone From Understanding Them Accurately
A manager may feel distressed by an employee’s difficulty while misunderstanding its cause. Another may remain emotionally composed, ask useful questions, and arrange effective support. The amount of emotion visible to an observer does not establish the accuracy or usefulness of either response.
Neuroscience investigates aspects of these processes under defined conditions. Singer and colleagues’ study of empathy for pain found overlap in some affective responses to pain experienced by oneself and pain signalled for a partner, without the same overlap in sensory components. It concerns a particular experimental situation, not a complete explanation of everyday empathy.
The result cannot establish that reading a colleague’s face reveals what they feel or that text necessarily prevents emotional understanding. A brain response and accurate knowledge of another person’s circumstances are different questions.
For the deployment discussion, the practical objective is to establish what happened, how each person understood it, and what is needed next. Emotional concern can support that exchange, but the facts and the other person’s account still need to be obtained.
Check Interpretations Instead of Treating Them as Observations
A short message contains words and timing, but the recipient may add an interpretation about motive. They might infer anger, disappointment, urgency, or impatience. Those interpretations can be understandable without being confirmed.
Kruger and colleagues’ email experiments examined overconfidence in communicating tone. Their findings support checking whether an intended meaning was conveyed, rather than assuming that imagining a tone while writing makes it clear to the reader.
The sender can reduce ambiguity by stating the purpose and urgency. Asking to review a dependency before the next release gives the recipient more information than an unexplained request to talk. The recipient can ask what needs preparation instead of constructing an entire explanation from the brevity of the message.
This is not a demand to make every message lengthy or emotionally elaborate. Routine work can use concise conventions if people understand them. The important issue is whether an ambiguity matters and whether there is a workable way to resolve it.
For example, the manager could explain that the deployment discussion concerns an unresolved dependency, identify the decision needed, and say whether any preparation is required. If the employee still experiences the message as criticism, acknowledging that effect does not require pretending criticism was intended. The two can compare what was written, what each understood, and what additional information would help next time. That creates a repair process without making one person’s inference the sole account of the exchange.
In-person conversations need checks too. Silence may indicate agreement, uncertainty, distraction, or reluctance to disagree. Treating one visible behaviour as a reliable signal can produce a mistaken conclusion in any medium.
Get the Other Person’s Perspective
Imagining how someone else feels can encourage consideration, but it can also lead people to project their own assumptions. A manager imagining the employee’s concern may focus on technical competence while the actual issue is an unclear decision or conflicting instruction.
Eyal, Steffel, and Epley’s perspective-taking experiments distinguished imagining another person’s perspective from obtaining information through conversation. Their results show why an attempt to take perspective should not automatically be treated as evidence of accuracy.
Ask a question that leaves room for a different account. The manager could ask how the release decision looked from the employee’s position and which information was missing. Reflect the answer back in a way the employee can correct.
Power affects what people are prepared to say. A request for honesty has limited value if previous disagreement was punished or if the employee does not know how the information will be used. Explain the purpose of the discussion, distinguish investigation from blame, and follow through on any promised action.
Respect boundaries around personal information. Someone can ask for a workload adjustment without sharing private details with an entire team. Useful understanding may concern the support required rather than the history behind the request.
Choose the Channel for the Particular Exchange
Text can provide time to think, an accessible record, and a chance to organise a difficult explanation. Voice can provide rapid clarification and information in speech. Video can help with demonstrations or visual context, while introducing its own demands. None is uniformly best for every person or conversation.
In Kraus’s voice-only communication experiments, voice-only conditions sometimes supported greater empathic accuracy than conditions adding visual information. The findings challenge an assumption that more channels always produce better understanding. They do not justify making voice-only contact mandatory.
Video use also has costs worth examining. Shockley and colleagues’ field experiment investigated camera use and fatigue in virtual meetings. It provides evidence for considering camera expectations, rather than attributing all meeting fatigue to a single mechanism of degraded social signalling.
For the deployment issue, a short call may resolve an ambiguity quickly, followed by a written record of the decision. An employee who needs time to organise the explanation might prefer to send an account first. Accessibility, privacy, connectivity, and the urgency of the work belong in that choice.
The technology-design article examines how interfaces affect the information available during a task. Improving sound quality, access to shared material, or turn-taking may help more than simply adding another scheduled meeting.
Make Context Available Without Requiring Constant Visibility
Distributed teams may need to state information that colleagues would otherwise learn incidentally. Availability, ownership, deadlines, and unresolved dependencies can be made visible through shared records. This does not require employees to broadcast their emotional state throughout the day.
Distinguish operational context from speculation about people. A note that a release owner is unavailable until tomorrow is useful. A conclusion that someone is disengaged because their camera is off is an interpretation that needs checking, if it needs to be raised at all.
Hybrid arrangements require attention to who can participate in decisions. A conversation among people in the same room may be helpful, but its outcome should reach affected colleagues elsewhere. Record the decision, rationale, and outstanding questions so participation does not depend on overhearing it.
The same approach helps people who were absent from the office or meeting for other reasons. Shared context supports continuity across time zones, leave, role changes, and different working patterns. It is an organisational capability, not merely a compensation for remote work.
Informal contact can still be valuable. Offer opportunities that fit people’s circumstances rather than assuming that compulsory social calls will create closeness. An activity that helps one colleague may be tiring, inaccessible, or intrusive for another.
Judge Understanding Through What Happens Next
After the deployment conversation, check whether both people agree on the issue, owner, and next action. They can acknowledge the effect of a message while correcting a mistaken inference about its intent. Agreement about every feeling or judgement is not required to establish a workable response.
Where the disagreement is substantive, preserve it. Empathy does not require abandoning a safety concern, accepting an unsupported claim, or concealing a difficult decision. It can improve how the issue is understood and handled without removing the conflict.
Look for evidence of repair: an ambiguity was resolved, a commitment was completed, a workload concern received a response, or a colleague could correct an assumption without penalty. Attendance, emoji use, and camera-on time provide much weaker evidence of those outcomes.
Avoid turning those checks into emotional surveillance. Automatically classifying faces, voices, or message sentiment would introduce further questions about accuracy, interpretation, and privacy; it would not establish what support a colleague wants. A direct, appropriately bounded conversation may provide the relevant information with fewer assumptions. Teams can review their communication arrangements through reported difficulties and resolved cases without requiring everyone to display a prescribed emotional style.
The storytelling article considers how accounts of experience shape understanding. A vivid account can help colleagues see a problem while still requiring checks on facts and interpretation. Listening carefully does not make every explanation complete.
For the manager and employee, progress comes from making the purpose clear, obtaining the other’s account, choosing a workable channel, and acting on what was learned. Empathy research supports asking more precise questions about those processes. It does not establish that a workplace’s capacity for understanding can be read directly from its location policy or communication technology.
