WhatsApp at work with a deaf or hard-of-hearing colleague

Voice notes have taken over work chats: a memo dictated between two meetings, an instruction dropped while walking, an impromptu team update in a WhatsApp group. Handy for whoever is talking. Far less so for a deaf or hard-of-hearing colleague, for whom every voice note is a wall.

This article offers concrete habits to keep a team where no one is left out, without upending everyone's life.

Why voice notes exclude, at work even more than elsewhere

In a work setting, voice notes stack up drawbacks for a hard-of-hearing person.

They can't be read. Text can be read, enlarged, reread in the quiet. A voice note demands the ear, maybe a hearing aid pushed to its limits in a noisy open plan.

They can't be searched. "What did the client ask for again?" Text is found by search. A voice note isn't: you have to replay the whole thing.

They can't be quoted. A written instruction can be copied into a CRM, forwarded, archived. A dictated instruction evaporates.

For a hard-of-hearing colleague, these aren't annoyances: they're barriers that, stacked together, push them out of the loop.

The team habits that change everything

Good news: making a team accessible takes no big budget, just a few shared habits.

Text by default for anything that commits. A task, a date, a number, an address, a decision: it gets written down. Always. Voice notes stay fine for context, nuance, encouragement, but the actionable information exists in text.

The summary that goes with the voice note. If someone insists on sending a long voice note, they add two lines of text with the gist. The hard-of-hearing colleague reads it, and everyone else saves time too.

No voice notes for precise info. Dictating an address or a code forces people to replay it three times. In text, it copy-pastes.

These rules have a happy side effect: they make the team more efficient for everyone, not just the person concerned. A written instruction beats a dictated one, full stop.

Frame it as a norm, not a favour

The trap would be to handle this case by case, asking each person to "make an effort" for one specific colleague. That's fragile and a little humiliating for the person singled out.

Better to set a collective rule: "here, anything that involves an action gets written down." Framed as a team norm, it forces no one to ask for special treatment, and inclusion becomes a habit rather than an exception.

The individual safety net: convert it yourself

No team is perfect, and there will always be voice notes. A hard-of-hearing colleague can take back control on their side, without asking anyone for anything.

Tools like Abrège turn a WhatsApp voice note into text or a summary in a few seconds: you forward the message, you get the gist in writing, you reply precisely. The colleague no longer depends on everyone's goodwill on every message; they read what's sent to them, the way others read their emails.

It's a safety net, not an excuse for the team to change nothing: the two go together. Collective habits cut the number of problem voice notes, the individual tool neutralises the ones that get through anyway.

In short

A team that runs on voice notes can, without meaning to, exclude a deaf or hard-of-hearing colleague. The answer has two parts: simple team habits (writing down what commits, a summary on long voice notes, never a voice note for precise info), set as a norm rather than a favour, and an individual safety net that converts what remains to text.

The result isn't just a more inclusive team. It's a team where information flows better, for everyone.