# The Shift in Workplace Communication

By Howard Holton · Published 2020-11-23 · Updated 2026-07-23 · Industrial IoT on MarketScale
Canonical: https://www.marketscale.com/industries/industrial-iot/the-shift-in-workplace-communication

> One of the biggest challenges we’ve all faced in light of COVID-19, is a rapid transition from active to passive communication, especially in the workplace. When passive communication occurs, such as an email or text message, the recipient reads it, reacts to it, and then chooses to communicate or not by responding or ignoring…

## Key points

- COVID-19 has accelerated the transition from active to passive workplace communication.
- Passive communication requires recipients to decide their response to messages.
- The transition enables more empathetic and transparent interactions.

One of the biggest challenges we’ve all faced in light of COVID-19, is a rapid transition from active to passive communication, especially in the workplace. When passive communication occurs, such as an email or text message, the recipient reads it, reacts to it, and then chooses to communicate or not by responding or ignoring the message. Because many employees are no longer working together in an office, there are much less opportunities for active communication, as you can’t walk up to someone’s desk if you need to speak to them. Now if you want to speak with someone audibly or visually, you need to schedule and wait for a phone or video meeting to occur.

While this shift to almost entirely passive communication has its challenges, [Nasheen Liu](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nasheenliu/?originalSubdomain=ca), Founding Partner, [The IT Media Group](https://theitmediagroup.com/), sees potential benefits. “What this crisis has done, is that in some ways, or in a lot of ways, it actually has dismantled this stiff buttoned down corporate facade and it allows us to be more human. And we’ve discovered us, as real people, and with real lives. And you know, and this discovery is quite liberating for us as individuals, as well as businesses, when we communicate to others,” Liu said. She feels this is especially true when we communicate with our business partners, staff, and customers. “It really cuts down to what’s really important, right, so we allow ourselves to all of a sudden to be more direct, more honest, more open. And with the level of transparency, we’ve never experienced before. And there’s also that human layer, that humanity layer, right. So we are now more empathetic, show more compassion in our day to day communication, whether it be with our teams, or customers, or just a corporate communication to businesses,” Liu explained.

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