Edit 1- In any circumstances do you believe verbal conversations for important tasks - once you complete task and the author of task says some additional points to incorporate by suppressing you like ideally you not understood what he/she said verbally.
cause- after giving the task author realizes more kpi’s wrt to task and mean in a way he/she told you already but as you dnt have any written documents you will be stuck in a vicious circle of redoing the tasks.
verbal communication
written documented communication
What do you mean? What is your point? Provide some examples, context, please. In some situations, some things should be fixed in certain ways, some written requirements, rules, agreements not because "oral communication seems shady’ but because of circumstances, because different people need access to the same info, because you need to return back to some info in the future, because you just may forget something and you need some references, etc
Verbal communication works well when all parties trust each other and want to work together towards the shared goal (or at least something that is mutually beneficial).
The unfortunate reality is that this is not a case for some people, some times. If you find yourself in situation where the other party might use verbal communication to take advantage of you, then having certain decisions in writing might be a way to protect yourself and reduce the risk.
I commonly see verbal comms used around requirements and user-experiences, neither of which are things that only 3 people in the entire company need to know.
Having worked in teams in the past, where verbal communication does work as a cheap way to get things done I can concur with @mirekdlugosz . However when something needs conveying to the support or QA team, then staff churn and training has to happen all of the time due to short customer turnaround expectations, written instructions work.
We have all seen jira tickets where a dev says they have “fixed it”, and they probably have, but without the repro steps, or cause description get lost. When giving the ticket to a different person while people are on holiday clogs up the pipeline. It’s all very time bound, if a task takes a total elapsed time of less than a day, verbal is fine. Anything longer and you are saving nobody the effort, it depends entirely on how many people need to know, if the sum total is maximum three people, typing it into a keyboard is overkill. Verbal is not really shady, but I call it busy-work, forcing people to later query what you did, draws attention to your labour if done too frequently. (It might also help to identify if it’s the same person doing it all of the time and if it is a narcissistic tendency and work with it accordingly.)
Everyone needs to be working from the same source of truth. Verbal communication should be documented with a note about the conversation, tagging the person who communicated it and anyone who needs to know about it.
Sometimes we can save a lot of time by just asking someone what they meant by what they wrote. But we need to give the rest of the team the benefit of that conversation by documenting it.
This seems like a communications/cultural question.
As long as a team has a shared spoken language, similar knowledge, similar culture and shared domain language then verbal instructions might be enough… I mention that because Brits are regarded as fairly ‘passive’ in communication - unlike other countries who can be seen as more brusque. The latter would probably give more explicit instructions!
One suggestion is to send an email summarising the person’s request and asking if it’s ok. That demonstrates active listening and creates a paper trail (but adds time to every request of course).
I think it goes both ways. I prefer verbal followed by documenting what was discussed. Also, I find it easier to write after verbal communication since all the brainstorming is being done by more than 1 brain.
, I have updated the post description to give you more context.
