Brown Bagger
This section is set up to provide a ready-made Brown Bag Session for you to use with employees and/or managers. Use as is, or adapt this information for a general employee group. You may reproduce as many copies as needed.
Using Email to Make, not Break, a Career
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ype. Click. Send. We send emails everyday without giving them a thought. Email has become the most prevalent form of communication in the business world. Emails have increasingly replaced face-to-face meetings and phone calls. Executives who once dictated letters to administrative assistants now send their own emails from PCs, laptops, and Blackberries®. And yet, how much training have most people received about the proper use of email? Probably little, if any, even though email has not only changed the way people do business, “it has begun to define how we are viewed as professionals and people,” claims Janis Fisher Chan, author of EMail: A Write It Well Guide — How to Write and Manage E-Mail in the Workplace, $21.99, Write It Well, ISBN: 0-9637455-8-1. “It’s not uncommon to have only an email relationship with certain colleagues — colleagues we may never meet in person or even on the phone,” Chan states. “The words we write are very real representations of our companies and ourselves. We must be sure that our email messages are sending the right messages about us.” Weighing the Good and the Bad Email also impacts careers by affecting productivity. Email allows you to send a message to 50 co-workers in the same building in the click of a mouse. But on the other hand, you can spend the better part of a day bogged down in unanswered email piling up relentlessly in your inbox. In short, email is a double-edged sword. Done well, it’s a powerful business tool. Done poorly, it causes serious problems for individuals and organizations. As a result, practical strategies (such as those offered in Chan’s book) are needed to make sure the email you write gets the results you want. Some advice includes: Use the journalism “lead” approach to get to the point fast. Have you ever noticed that the first paragraph of newspaper article — September 2007
referred to as the “lead” — contains the most important information? The rest of the story provides details that support, explain, expand on, or illustrate that information. Here’s an easy way to figure out what your main point is: Imagine that your reader is about to go through airport security on the way to an important meeting. You have 15 seconds to shout out your message before he/she disappears into the crowd. What would you say? Make your subject line a “headline.” A well-written subject line is like the headline for a newspaper article — it draws the reader’s attention, and it tells the reader what the email is about. The subject line gives the reader a reason to open the message. It’s also your first and most important opportunity to get your message across. Instead of, “New Program,” write “Accepting applications for flex-time program.” Instead of “Changes,” write “Health benefits to change next year.” Instead of “Dates,” write “Kickoff Meeting — Apr. 2, 6, or 9.” See the difference? Which messages would you be more likely to open? Be informative and compelling, not vague or confusing. Exercise: Ask participants to share some of the subject lines in their inboxes. Which emails have subject lines that accurately reflect the intent of the message? Which subject lines should have been retitled? _________________________________________ _________________________________________ _________________________________________ _________________ Combat ADT by controlling your email habit. According to experts on Attention Deficit Disorder, workers who impulsively check and respond to every email that drops into their inbox — thus failing to stay EA Report Brown Bagger 1