The Art of Letters and Its Lessons: Why Slowness, Care, and Empathy Are Essential for Dialogue and Relationships in the Workplace
This time, communications expert Linda Baleta brings to VNA a perspective on the art of letter writing and what it teaches us about dialogue in the workplace.
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What the art of letter writing teaches us about dialogue in the workplace
There is something special about the act of writing a letter by hand! In Anne Youngson's novel Meet Me at the Museum, two strangers, Tina in England and Anders in Denmark, begin a correspondence that becomes a lifeline for them. What begins with curiosity about Tollundi Man turns into a slow exchange of thoughts, regrets, lives, and hopes. Each letter is read and reread, each response is not brought to life by haste, but by care.
The book got me thinking: what would happen if more of our communication in the workplace had the same depth?
Letters take days, even weeks, to write and arrive at the addressee. This delay requires patience. But it also makes responses well-thought-out and not just reactions. On the other hand, the workplace today celebrates instant responses, the sign that the message was read, the replies within five minutes, the messages that are answered before they have even arrived. But important conversations, those about values, mistakes, opportunities, or the direction the organization is going, require the discipline of slowness. Depth does not require delay for the sake of delay, but intentionality.
Just as Anders pauses before responding to Tina, we too can learn to restrain our reflexes to rush. Drivers in particular need to be vigilant. Sometimes, an email is not just information conveyed, but a silent cry for help, a signal that someone needs to be heard beyond the words on the screen. Reading it twice before responding once can make all the difference.
Tina and Anders are not young. Their letters carry the weight of lives lived, choices made, paths unfinished. The workplace often treats people as if they only exist on the payroll. We forget that every colleague comes with decades of experience, with hidden stories of loss, joy, compromise, and patience. Understanding this changes the way we communicate. It reminds us to see the whole person, not just their function. Asking about someone’s life outside the office, not to gather additional “evidence” or to have something to talk about during a coffee break, but to listen without rushing back to the to-do list, can change a relationship more than any “team building.”
What connects Tina and Anders is not obligation, but fascination. It is a body from the Iron Age in Denmark, preserved in mud. This seemingly strange subject becomes their bridge. In the workplace, empathy is often born not from tasks and deadlines, but from finding a common interest. It could be gardening, a TV series, or even a strange passion for cooking. Shared interests open the door to trust. They remind us that beyond quarterly reports and indicators, we are human beings capable of amazement. Empathy, after all, is rarely built on formal reports. It is built when we quietly say: “Do you like this too?”
“Meet Me at the Museum” is, at its core, a novel about connection across distance, age, interests, and differences. It seems to tell us that when we slow down, when we honor the time we each carry with us, and when we share common interests, communication becomes richer. Perhaps a good question for the workplace is this: if you had to write just one letter to a colleague, a letter that would be read slowly and filed away, what would you write?
