Over the last decade, email has become the cornerstone of business communication across industries & geographies. They are good at handling the transactional communication that most of our business roles involve. But they suck in communicating emotions or feelings. I routinely check myself against reading the emotions of the email sender and actively profess against it to anyone who cares to listen.

Over the same period, Emotional Quotient as a business competence has grown in stature & importance. Reading any content about EQ, you find out that that the ability to actively respond to others feelings & emotions in our interactions (business or otherwise) is a key requirement.

So if emails are bad in communicating emotions & EQ is critical to building positive relationships, where has the email era left us wrt positive relationships in business?

Taking this further, if email-like communication is taking over our personal lives too (via social networking sites), what is in store for personal relationships?

Thankfully, Facebook is already thinking on these lines & is taking steps to address such needs. Read more about this initiative here.

[Picture courtesy: flickr | aaipodpics]