It never ceases to amaze me how quickly new technology becomes a part of everyday working life and the speed that we take technological developments for granted. Recently I was having problems connecting to the internet via our ISDN connection (unfortunately, there are still areas in the UK without broadband) and I was immediately faced with the problem of not being able to send out clients’ urgent press releases.
As I pondered my offline predicament I was transported back to being an 18-year-old junior in a sales office where I used an electric typewriter to produce the letters of the day. It was a slow and laborious process, especially if you made a mistake and had to start again. This sense of tedium enveloped me as I knew that I would have to resort to not an electric typewriter but mail merging letters and printing out the press releases, then stuffing the information into envelopes. It wasn’t that long ago that being able to mass produce letters in the time it would have taken a small army of typists seemed a highly efficient way to work – how quickly times change.
The problem with the ISDN connection was soon resolved and was back online. As I hit the ‘send/receive’ button, I reflected how easy it is to e-mail; I also reflected that a noun has now become a verb. E-mailing is almost as easy as talking and a lot quicker than texting; it is silent, immediate, fast and yet can still come across as being a slightly impersonal medium – probably because everyone thinks that e-mails should be far less formal than letters.
Despite the many benefits that e-mail brings to our lives, it can also be a dangerous tool and one that should be handled with caution. It is too easy to use the ‘reply’ or ‘forward’ options in our e-mail software than it is to send a fresh one. Familiarity does breed contempt and before we know it we’re forwarding a long e-mail chain for all subsequent recipients to read.
If we receive an unpleasant (or even a rather intimate) e-mail we should be very careful how we respond. As Bill Howard, in his article Save Yourself from E-mail Faux Pas, explains: “No matter how annoyed you are at some jerk’s e-mail, save your ‘that’ll put the S.O.B. in his place’ response and look at it again an hour later or first thing the next day. Chances are you’ll want to tone it down.”
Not only may you want to tone the response down, you may not want to end up in court. Unlike telephone calls or sending text messages, with e-mail you are actually publishing material and can be used in a court of law if you are making false accusations are producing inflammatory material. An innocent e-mail to a loved one or a rant about a loathed boss can soon end up half way around the world, leaving the originator of the e-mail embarrassed at best and worst without a job. The same goes for CCs: be careful who you might be unwittingly including in your circulation list.
Getting the message to the right recipient in the first place may not be as easy as you might expect, as Bill Howard suggests: “Use addressee auto-fill cautiously. If you type C-l-a-u, Claudia Andrews appears in the addressee window before Claudia Mezza. Hit enter too soon and you’ll send the message to the wrong Claudia.” However. if you’re generating an e-mail from a database that interfaces with Outlook or Outlook Express then you’re less likely to get the wrong person because you’re creating an e-mail from a unique record and you’d know immediately if you’d opened the wrong record.
With previous technologies there wasn’t the need to be so careful, but with e-mail my advice is that we should observe a few simple rules. Business e-mail should remain for business. Use a Hotmail, or similar server-based e-mail systems, for personal contacts. Where you do receive personal e-mails at work, check the policy of the employer; you might be breaking the terms of your employment (sending personal e-mails is no different from making personal telephone calls) and with spyware able to monitor every keystroke, you don’t know who might be watching.
A few years ago when I working for one particular employer I only found out after sending many e-mails to recruitment agencies that all e-mails (sent and received) were retained on their system, even after deleting them from my own computer.
Whether or not it is company policy I also suggest sending out fresh e-mails every time. This way you can’t accidentally send sensitive information to third party recipients. It may be more time consuming to start with a new e-mail, but this way you’ll avoid falling into the bear traps triggered by lazy habit of hitting the ‘reply’ and ‘forward’ buttons.
Don’t respond immediately to what appears to be an unfriendly or rude e-mail the moment you have read it. If and when you do receive such e-mails, the safety of the anonymity of the screen can lull you into a false sense of security and anger can soon burst forth. Perhaps this should be called screen rage, but whatever it might be called, my advice is walk away and take a breather. Even if the e-mail is unpleasant it is much more positive to deal with it when you are calmer and more focused.
To ensure that you don’t send e-mails that are likely to cause offence avoid sarcasm – it can come across too heavy in e-mail – and irony is often too subtle. The best option is to play it straight.
To get the most out of e-mail we need to apply a few commonsense rules. After all, we know how to behave on the telephone and writing letters so why get careless with e-mail? With e-mail now so much a part of our working life we use it without thought, but as professional communicators we need to be setting the agenda for best practice in all areas of communication and remember that our clients may not be giving the attention they should to such a powerful communications tool.
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