At the office, email is an extremely valuable communication tool. It allows you to send a message to multiple senders at once, transmit documents, track conversations, and it is very convenient in the fact that users can respond on their own schedules. However, email can also be the source of many headaches and problems in the workplace.
What if someone doesn’t reply to your email and it is time sensitive?
What if someone misreads your email and reacts in a way that was not expected?
Since we cannot hear the tone of the sender, what if someone applies the wrong emotion to the message?
These are all things we need to look out for when sending email and could possibly be easily prevented.
If it is time sensitive, by putting so in the subject line, the recieve will know that they need to read and respond in a timely manner.
By keeping the email factual and direct with clear expectations most misunderstandings can be prevented.
And finally, by reading your email from the recievers viewpoint before sending it out, hopefully you can prevent any emotional misunderstandings.
While doing all of these will help your email be more efficient, email can still be difficult in the workplace do to the balance of formality and informality.
On a personal level, email is generally very informal, but at work we are still expected to follow general guidelines of grammer and ettiquette. So how do we balance this? I have a few ideas I’m going to try this week to keep email formal, but friendly and effiecient. I’ll post more on the tactics and results next week!
