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See also Part 2: 10 Ways to Tame Your E-Mail Monster
Unlike so much that HR must wrestle with to achieve change for the better, there is one area of individual behaviour where it is relatively easy to get tangible improvements within a few hours.
Countless employees daily waste other people’s time with poor e-mail practices including badly written mails that are only too easy to ignore.
Recently communications within a global logistics company virtually ground to a halt when someone hit the REPLY ALL button on their e-mail. The company had issued an informative e-mail to its several hundred thousand employees about changes due to take place in the corporate phone system.
A single recipient who failed to understand the mail asked for clarification hitting the Reply ALL button in his confusion. The result was a deluge of responses with the cumulative effect that the company lost an entire day of electronic working and communication.
Most people have their own reply all story. During the late 1990’s, there was a famous incident inside Microsoft where a distribution list appropriately called BEDLAM DL3, was used to send a message to 25,000 people. When one employee felt the message was irrelevant she mailed the entire list asking to be removed.
It triggered a storm of Reply All’s saying “Me too”, followed by another storm of Reply All’s saying “Stop using Reply-All. Within an hour, 15.5 million messages, representing 195 Gigabytes of bandwidth, passed across the network grinding the entire email system to a halt.
Apart from avoiding the dreaded Reply All danger, writing more succinctly is one definite benefit from helping people improve their mails. As Twitter shows, just about any topic can be communicated effectively within 150 characters. If you must write to that length you do.
IBM once issued its now famous edict that no report written for management could be more than a single A4 page and people managed perfectly well working within that limit.
One aspect of e-mail practice where people clearly need help is in how to make their mails more impactful. This is exactly the equivalent of how to make one’s presentation more effective. Many of the underlying principles of good face-to-face communication apply equally to the written form.
While once rigid rules about spelling and grammar have been fraying at the edges in our era of instant written communication, the need to write with more impact has been becoming ever more important. How do you make your e-mail stand out from all the rest so that it cannot easily be ignored? What sticks in peoples’ memories and why? Where should you put the most important piece of information in your mail, at the start or at the end?
The gains from even a day’s development in this area can be quite disproportionate to the actual time and money spent on the learning experience. The company benefits can be almost tangible, and those who have experienced help to improve their e-mails report that they now feel well-armed and write their mails differently.
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See also Part 2: 10 Ways to Tame Your E-Mail Monster
www.maynardleigh.co.uk
