In this age of email communications, it is all too easy to ignore face-to-face discussion in favour of clicking the send button.

If you are a manager there are plenty of good reasons to encourage and foster the use of communications by other means, including the short walk down the hall to talk with a colleague.

I have been in former workplaces where people slowly switched to email as their main form of communications for various reasons - and have seen the resulting misunderstandings, unnecessary delays to tasks, mistakes, and even anguish as a result.

I have even seen people sitting across the same newsroom sending emails to each other, rather than talk.

This is true self-alienation not particular to the profession.

Newsrooms and other workplaces have become rather quiet places over the years.

It is not that email is 'bad' or 'good'.

Email is a useful tool that has expanded the ways we communicate and helped speed up processes in the workplace.

Email is a complement to the ways we communicate in the digital age.

Anyone who has been in the media for 15 years or so can remember the trouble it took to receive press releases or important documents that we needed to do our work.

However there are many reasons why people slowly start moving more toward email as a preference and away from verbal communications.

In the main I think this is due to achieving a certain comfort level of not having to deal with potentially troublesome situations in a face-to-face.

In extreme cases we may become pod like, shunning the human contact in favour of the pace of email.

It is easier to hold some one at arm's length and have to listen to what we might consider time wasting talk.

The tendency to shun verbal communication is also due to a certain laziness.

Sending an email is easier than picking up the phone or taking a walk over to a colleague.

Email is also an inherent encouragement to procrastination.

The pace of email allows one to respond to a request for action on a task or a job with another asking for clarification for example.

Email spawns back and forth emails.

You can bet that the person in the two-way or multiple email communication chain is either away from their desk and will not get back to you before the end of the day, putting off the task until the next.

The usual reaction of some managers might be to push people into talking again through mandating such action, but this might only backfire.

Human nature being what it is, you will soon see that you have to go with the flow.

I suggest that managers and business owners need to work around employees' tendencies to stick to email not by mandates, but by encouraging talk. The company kitchen, cafeteria or water dispenser are obvious places where conversations can be encouraged.

Having more than one meeting room is a bonus, especially if you can make them of different sizes.

I have found that large all purpose meeting rooms tend to discourage small teams from getting together in them, especially if upper management takes a proprietary view of them.

An empty, pristine meeting room is a sad sight.

When some managers counter that more rooms encourage more meetings and hence more time wasting, I always say it is up to them to modulate any excesses.

I note some companies with enough money and space have set up moveable cubicles so instant meeting places can be created for various sized groups.

I know of one company that even put chairs and tables at odd spots around an office and found that these were being used to great effect.

This was a very simple and cost-effective way of encouraging discussion, of creating more opportunities in the office to interface.

I am sure there are many other relatively cheap methods of helping staff lubricate their gums for talking, other than the Friday afternoon get together.

Do you have any other ideas that you would like to share? Send them to me.

Send any comments to Ahmed at elamin.ahmed@gmail.com