There is a time and place for a podcast-length voice note, and work is neither.
We all have that one friend who, instead of calling to catch up, sends you a 10-minute-long voice note (or should we say, podcast), where they go on and on about every single recent event in their lives. They love being able to yap without interruption, even though they lose their train of thought every 30 seconds and change the subject to something completely different.
You know what, we won’t even judge you if you are that friend, we get it, it’s fun. Sometimes we even put on these voice notes while we’re commuting to work and actually listen to them like it’s a podcast, then we spend the entire drive back recording our response.
But there is a huge difference between having a friend send you voice notes like these and having someone from work do it with work-related issues. Every. Single. Time.
The thing about voice notes is that they can be quicker for the person sending them, but they usually aren’t for those who have to listen. You can get the same message across with a few written sentences, but nobody has the energy to articulate their thoughts into written words anymore. We just record our unfiltered thoughts and let the person on the other side try to decipher what we wanted to convey or what we need from them. And in a workplace setting, that can get really old, really fast.
The tech support in the story below insists on conveying their support only through voice texts. When someone from the company asks for their help, they reply with a two-minute-long voice note explaining what they need to do. Then, the person on the other side has to listen to the voice note, focus on what is being said between the “ummms” and the “hmms”, and replay the note over and over again until they find the solution they asked for.
The company’s IT manager kept asking the tech support team to switch to text, but they never complied. This led the manager to decide to give the team a taste of their own medicine, and started sending all their passwords and credentials in voice notes; long, messy passwords with numbers, uppercase, and lowercase letters all via audio.
It wasn’t long before the tech team realized just how complicated they made things for other people…
