By John Prohodsky
Principal – Future Envisoned
Future Envisioned helps client invent their future. John can be reached at
john@future-envisioned.org
Email might be the riskiest behavior that you engage in every day.
I don’t mean hitting “reply all” instead of “reply” or forwarding an email to the wrong person. Far more damaging is a poorly written email. A poorly organized email that doesn’t communicate its intended message presents a risk to both yourself and the company.
How often have you received an email and found out later that you didn’t understand what it said or missed something important? Embarrassed you were? If the same person repeatedly sends emails that are hard to understand, she becomes known as a bad communicator or gets a reputation as being unorganized.
It can get worse; a poorly written email can make your boss look bad in front of his boss. And you have a performance review next week. Talking about bad business karma.
Let’s look at a few examples: There is the hidden impact of a poorly written email on a project. For example, the email below is ambiguous about the topic and its urgency.
Subject: Document review
We reviewed the documents you sent and found several deficiencies that need to be attended to. The review was done by department members and an outside consultant that we have used before. Upon consideration of the nature of the results of the review, it was decided that department needs to review the results. Please let me know of your availability for a meeting.
This email says that a review of some documents found a few problems and that a meeting is needed. It doesn’t sound urgent so you don’t act on it. The attendees at the meeting thought they had resolved the problem but didn’t realize they created other problems that you would have caught.
The above email can be rewritten to convey specifics and urgency.
Subject: Serious customer problems
We reviewed the field problem reports and found several instances where our product’s malfunctions cause customers to miss delivery dates. We need to resolve these problems by the end of the week. The problems include:
(A very brief description of a few representative problems.)
We need to meet at 8 am tomorrow morning in the conference room to resolve the issues.
The rewritten email is better, but the action required is at the end of the email. The email can be revised to communicate more clearly:
Subject: Serious repeat customer problems
We reviewed the field problem reports and found several instances where our product’s malfunctions cause customers to miss delivery dates. We will meet at 8 am tomorrow morning in the conference room to resolve the issues.
The problems include:
(A very brief description of a few representative problems.)
We need to resolve these problems by the end of the week.
The revised email allows a quick scan of the email to identify the urgency of the issue and the action required. A complete reading provides background information and the objective.
Email consumes more and more of our time and has become the background noise of business. This is what you can do to improve your email communications, visit EmailCharter.org.