Email is a surprisingly dangerous medium. Friendships have shattered, business relationships and entire companies have dissolved and people have gone to prison because of careless emails.
Consider the following actual email exchange (excerpted from “Send,” by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe – an indispensable book on the subject*):
From: Dianna
Dear Attorney K ----,
At this time I am writing to inform you that I will not be accepting your offer. ...I have decided instead to work for myself, and reap 100% of the benefits that I sow. ...
From: William
Dianna – Given that you had two interviews, were offered and accepted the job ... I am surprised that you chose an email and a 9:30 voicemail message to convey this information to me ...
From: Dianna
A real lawyer would have put the contract into writing ...
From: William
Thank you for the refresher course on contracts ... Do you really want to start pissing off more experienced lawyers at this early stage in your career?
From: Dianna
bla bla bla
It’s hard to imagine that these two people would have this conversation if they were talking face to face. What is it about e-mail, that it can veer so suddenly and disastrously off track?
Fast and Faceless
Two qualities of email set it apart from other forms of business communication: it’s very fast, and it’s faceless.
If your office intranet is speedy enough, you and a colleague can create an email misunderstanding in less than a minute. If she sends you an ill-considered message, your temptation will always be to send an immediate response – and off you go!
And email is faceless because it’s not moderated by tone, timing or gesture. If you meet with somebody, you both pick up cues from each other’s speech, gestures and facial expressions, and (presumably) use these to keep the conversation cordial and businesslike.
Even telephone conversations convey important nonverbal information with tone of voice and rhythm, such as pauses or interruptions. And telephone conversations are synchronous: you’re both participating in an event in real time, with many opportunities to modify the trajectory of the conversation and correct misunderstandings.
But e-mail just sits there on the screen: blank words waiting for us to project our fears and resentments into them.
Avoiding Misunderstandings
In a very short time, email has become the primary medium for business communication, and it won’t be going away. Its speed gives it an advantage over business letters, which have all but disappeared; and its asynchronous nature gives it an advantage over telephone calls: I can send out a query to you at any time without fear of interrupting you, knowing that you will answer when you can.
So it’s essential to master the basics of safe, courteous email. They’re not that hard; the trick is to remember them when you’re multitasking at the keyboard.
Is this e-mail necessary? Trillions of emails are sent every week, and office workers in the U.S. spend at least 25% of their time on email (American Management Association survey). As Shipley and Schwalbe write, “the ease of email encourages unnecessary exchanges.” Is the email you’re about to write one of them?
Check your reaction. If you’re responding to an email, are you having a strong reaction to it? If so, it’s time to slow down, and it’s almost certainly not the right time to write back.
Make your subject line descriptive. This is an important courtesy to your recipient, who probably has to deal with hundreds of emails and will not appreciate subject lines like “????” or “meeting.”
Know your relationship. Always take into account your relationship with the recipient. This will help you calibrate how familar or formal your tone is, avoid inappropriate remarks and use the correct greeting: is it “Dear Ms. Sullivan” or “Hi Pam!”
Write carefully. You don’t have to be a skilled writer to pay attention to what you’re writing. As you write, ask yourself precautionary questions such as “would I say this to him in person?” and “how would I feel if I received this?”
Keep it brief.
Re-read before sending. Check your spelling, punctuation and grammar with the same care you use to check what you’re wearing each morning (both affect the impression you make on people). Equally important, scrutinize every sentence. Can it possibly be misinterpreted? (If so, there’s a good chance it will be.)
Stop emailing. If this is turning into a conflict, stop emailing and go resolve it in person, or at least over the telephone.
There are also any number of common email annoyances you should avoid, such as “funny” jokes that aren’t, and unnecessary attachments (see Sidebar). Pam Sullivan says, “it’s one thing if you’re on the phone with a client and say, ‘I saw a bear this weekend! Do you want me to send a picture?’ and if they say yes, then send it. But if I send bear pictures to everybody, I’m just filling up their inboxes with junk.”
Avoiding Jail
What do Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom and Merck have in common? Emails used in courtroom evidence sent high-level executives to prison, dissolved huge corporations and evaporated billions of dollars in market capitalization.
If you don’t want to be a part of a scenario like this, remember two essential principles:
1) Email doesn’t go away. It doesn’t matter if you delete it, send it to the trash, empty the trash – the chances are it will continue to reside on some server you don’t even know about.
2) If it’s something you wouldn’t want used in court, don’t put it in an email.
Most companies have very explicit email policies, which you should read carefully and follow to the letter. Some do not even permit personal emails on company computers. All will tell you: do not expect privacy. At any time, your email may be read by somebody whose job it is to do so.
Your company should also have a record retention policy, specifying when and how documents should be retained or destroyed. Follow this policy exactly and consistently. You can go to prison for deleting emails as well as for writing them.
A corollary principle is, If you don’t want your email displayed on a bulletin board, don’t write it. One company faced six claims of sexual harassment because an employee posted an adult bulletin board on the email system. Another company paid $2.2 million in fines for racially charged email messages exchanged between employees. At the least, racial or sexual harassment in an email is a good way to get fired.
Email is an extremely powerful and useful business tool. And it’s not that hard to use safely and effectively. The key is not to get tripped up by how quick and informal it can be. You need to treat it with more formality, even if it’s just a casual exchange between peers. What impression is your email making? Is it possible it could be misinterpreted? Look it over carefully before you click on “Send.”
* “Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home,” David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2007.
Pet Peeves
Just about everybody has any number of pet peeves about email. (A recent blog on the topic attracted 140 entries.) Here are the top 13, not in any particular order.
- Big attachments that take forever to download
- “Important” emails sent to 14 people. “If I’m that important,” says a blogger, “why don’t you send the email just to me and send the thirteen others one of their own?”
- “Funny” emails, especially when the sender mails them on a regular basis
- “Heart-warming” emails
- Priority flags. “You should avoid them all,” says Shipley and Schwalbe. “Your email should speak for itself.” “Let me decide if it’s high priority,” says a blogger.
- Somebody who sends out every email with a high priority flag
- Thanking me in advance for my cooperation
- Sending to “Reply All” when everybody doesn’t need the reply
- Emoticons. “Your email should be well enough written that you don’t have to tell me about its tone,” says a blogger.
- All the little abbreviations: BTW, LOL, etc. “I don’t want to learn them all,” says a blogger, “and it takes me longer to read.”
- Long email exchanges that keep the same “Re:” subject line even though everybody has moved on to a different subject
- Blank email with the entire, long message typed into the subject line
- Starting a sentence in the subject line and finishing it in the body of the email
What are your email Pet Peeves? Send them to lee@sullivancreative.com
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