By Liz Scheier | May 07, 2021 In workplaces increasingly reliant on digital communication, teams are left wondering how to interpret tone in an email, whether the person on the other end of the Zoom call is impatient or just fast-talking, and what on Earth those emoji mean. Erica Dhawan offers guidance in PW called a “sharp, timely treatise” on navigating these pixelated cues. When did you first get interested in nonverbal communication? I grew up as a shy introverted girl in a family of Indian immigrants; I struggled with proficiency in English at school and Hindi at home. Struggling between the languages made it necessary to learn to decipher body languages, and I realized how important that was. Then I taught public speaking at Harvard, where I did graduate work. Over time I began teaching corporate leaders and teams, and I realized that there’s a new phenomenon causing so much misunderstanding in the workplace. Well before Covid, we were seeing these challenges in global offices, offices with distributed workforces, and even within the same office—team members emailing back and forth even though they sat close together. Just as I was an immigrant learning a new culture, now we’re all immigrants to digital body language.