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Speaking as a guy with a reasonably successful 30 year career: This is mostly not great advice. - Formatting is useful, and should be used as needed, especiall
by ubermonkey 7y ago
Speaking as a guy with a reasonably successful 30 year career: This is mostly not great advice.
- Formatting is useful, and should be used as needed, especially headings and, as indicated, color. Don't become a plaintext zealot. It's not a good hill to die on.
- Emails, like all communication, should be as short as possible -- but no shorter. Brevity itself is not a useful thing.
- The 2nd bullet is, about the request as a distinct paragraph, is good. A proper email that requests action should make that requested action VERY clear, along with expectations and ideally a timeline.
- Contrary to this assertion, email is actually an EXCELLENT forum for discussion in the right context. This is because email is easy to archive, and leaves a trail of the discussion. It's not the ONLY venue, but it's very useful, and in my career has been commonly used as such.
- jakubp 7y agoAny written medium is a bad forum for discussion because it completely lacks the wide emotional bandwidth. If the topic is in any way subtle, risky, controversial, etc. you will get more conflict, misunderstanding, etc. in writing than in person, and fallout will be much harder to get away from. That has been the experience of me and many managers I worked with in IT over the years. I would be shocked if you could get anywhere near the results of in-person conversations with written comms. That should only be possible if you are incredibly aligned with everyone in your org (how likely is that?) or you aren't really discussing anything openly (feigned discussions).
- ubermonkey 7y agoAll I can tell you is what I've seen as an internal resource, internal manager, consultant, and external vendor over 30 years. It can and does work. It's not a replacement for meetings (there's no one-size-fits-all in communication), but it is super useful and super effective if used correctly. I'm sorry your job has convinced you otherwise.
- jakubp 7y agoWhat's the median age of people you work with in that mode? (my guess above 35)
- ubermonkey 7y agoIt'd be hard to guess, but because we have a lot of younger workers on the front-end of our customers today, I'd guess early 30s.
- jakubp 7y agoNice! I'll think about what you've written. Thank you.
- roland35 7y agoThanks for the advice! I generally like to keep emails as plain as possible (I do not enjoy the collection of signature images/company logos that accumulate at the bottom of long email chains), but I do try to format important points with bold/color when appropriate. I have gotten into trouble being too concise in emails! Some people are quite sensitive to requests when they are too short, sometimes it helps to soften the request with a compliment or explaining the extenuating circumstances
- ubermonkey 7y agoZOMG everyone hates the sig pile. Like, if your signature and disclaimer boilerplate is longer than most of your emails, your company is DOING IT WRONG. I find restating context, even briefly, is nearly always worthwhile. You never want to make folks scroll down to see the rest of the chain if you can avoid it.