Email sits atop the pile of contenders to the modern communications throne, undisputed as the business choice for speaking to colleagues, customers, and everyone in-between. But for something so ubiquitous and well accepted, it is surprising how often it is mis-used, and doesn’t achieve the results that its users are aiming for.
You certainly can’t blame the fact that it’s a recent arrival on the business scene for the problems people encounter with its use. Email has been around for some time now, starting out as a simple file-note system way back in the mid-60s. But it was in the early 1990s, when personal computers started to become common that email came into its own, allowing people to easily communicate with each other without having to pick up a phone. Now while texting, Twitter and Facebook have entered the picture, email remains the bedrock of communication for most people, and yet it’s the one most people get wrong.
Why is this? It’s possibly because Twitter, texting and the like started out as vehicles of social interaction primarily, and were never viewed as a serious replacement for that most endangered of communication species, the humble letter. People used them as casual means of keeping in touch from the moment they appeared and there was never any question of them supplanting anything formal like good old “snail mail”.
A valid form of communication
But while email has been viewed for a long time as a legitimate replacement for letters, people in a business environment often forget to treat them in the same way they would a letter. Too often emails are lacking in the social graces, and blunt to the point of being rude. Or they are casual to the point of being over-familiar with senders not calibrating the tone of the email to the recipient. Yes you have sent all the information needed by the recipient but its effectiveness is lessened by the flawed tone of the email.
For instance if you are approaching, or responding to a customer for the first time, you would never dream of using chatty phrases or abrupt sentences since the customer would rightly dismiss you as rude or inconsiderate. You want to keep that customer, so you would treat them in a respectful, considered manner. Similarly you wouldn’t write to a business colleague you don’t know well or at all, and chat to them as if they are a member of your football team that you see every Tuesday night at practice.
But we do this in emails all the time thinking it is acceptable because it’s an email. What we need to do to stop this sort of thinking is remember that email is short for “electronic mail”, and as such, it needs to follow the same guidelines as a letter.
Guidelines
1. Who is the person you’re addressing?
How well do you know them? How broad is their knowledge of the email’s subject matter? Assumptions on either score will result in emails that don’t speak to that person, and certainly don’t convey their intended message as well as you want.
Think about the sort of person the recipient is, and how well you know them. There is something about putting pen to paper or speaking to a person that concentrates the mind and engages the better part of our social natures. Channel this when writing an email, and calibrate how friendly you are in the email.
For instance, if you have never met the person, be polite and deferential. If there is an ongoing relationship, by all means throw some warm tones into the mix, but stay professional. The only people who should ever get fun-filled, goofy emails from you should be close friends and family.
Knowledge-wise, always keep in mind that not everyone has the same understanding of a subject as you do. Don’t assume they have the same intimate awareness of the issue as you do, and write the email in a way that explains the issue at hand well without talking down to them.
2. Don’t ramble on.
Of course in your quest to make sure people are fully across the topic, the temptation is to go on at length, and forget that what you want to say can be said elegantly and briefly. By all means make sure that all the relevant points are covered, but remember too that people don’t want to grow old and die reading it.
3. Are you being too blunt?
On the other hand, in your quest to get your point across, it is all too easy to throw in everything you want to say into an email, and demand a response with all social niceties tossed to one side. Read out loud what you’ve written, and if you hear a discordant word, or a blunt inflection, re-word it. If it sounds like the sort of email you wouldn’t want to receive, then it needs finesse and the rough edges buffed to a more palatable smoothness.
During my time as an Executive Assistant in a major corporation, I saw people constantly dashing off emails with tonal edges so sharp you could slice meat with them. The offenders were people who would never dream of being rude to anyone in real life, but inadvertently did that repeatedly in their written correspondence.
4. Have you written the email in the most logical manner?
If you need to convey complex information or a process involving many steps, then you need to think long and hard about the best way to structure that information. Don’t make your recipient work too hard to understand what it is you’re saying.
Granted, it’s a difficult thing to do when you’re so familiar with something, but try to approach it from the point of view of a person learning about this for the first time. How would they best make sense of it? What would they need to know and in what order?
5. Don’t be afraid of sub-headings.
Being greeted by a great big wall of text is off-putting, and no one’s idea of fun. Using sub-headings breaks up the text and makes the information you have included much more accessible, and easy to find. For instance, you could have sub-headings like “Action needed to be taken” or “What you need to do”. However you word it, make sure what you need done is easily visible.
This is particularly useful if you need action taken or a deadline looms, and you need this person to give you their input as quickly as possible. They can ingest the information easily and respond to it in the timeframe required.
6. Don’t rush it.
In today’s hurried business world, the temptation is to dash off an email, and move on. But if the email is rushed, chances are it will sound dismissive or rude, and you will spend far more time explaining yourself or mollifying the recipient than you would have had you taken the time to craft the tone properly in the first place.
Again, I saw examples time and time again in my role as a team leader in a call centre. Emails were often dashed off simply to get them done, but the end result was often an escalated call to me, or my colleagues from a customer angry at the tone of the email they’d been sent.
Yes, the world is busy, and it can be daunting coping with the proliferation of communication options. But if we simply remember some old-fashioned snail mail social niceties when writing emails, they can go from an area of potential trouble to an effective arsenal in your communications with customer and colleagues.
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Posted on: 30 November 2011
