Don't Be Bob

Not every badly written or poorly considered email is the kind that is going to get you fired, but they can easily have an impact on the impression you make on your boss, your employees, your coworkers and clients. My interest in the problem of writing effective email developed out of a class I taught at the firm where I work. Concerned that her employees were sending unprofessional emails to clients and inappropriate messages to each other, a friend asked me to put together something along the lines of an “email etiquette” class we could deliver to everyone in her department. She was having particular trouble with one of her supervisors, “Bob,” whose emails to his co-workers were rude and often wound up annoying the attorneys and clients he dealt with. My friend hoped that offering a class to her employees would be useful to all of them, but would have a special impact on Bob.

Having been subjected to bad writing and bad manners in email for years, it was amazingly easy for me to come up with a list of topics that we could address in class: the careless spelling and grammar mistakes; the angry emails ricocheting around the office like bullets; the misdirected messages informing all two thousand people in our nine offices that there were leftover sandwiches in the 45th floor conference room in Los Angeles. Still, it seemed like a good idea to go around and talk to a few other people to see if they had any suggestion that I hadn’t thought of. So I talked to our HR manager, the secretarial supervisor, and a friend in marketing. While they all had good ideas (and some horrifying examples), I was surprised at how many of the things they mentioned were already on my list, and the consistency with which they all mentioned seeing the same problems in email across the firm.

The same thing happened whenever I mention to anyone at work that I was working on an email etiquette class-- I’d get pretty much the same response. “That’s great,” the receptionist said when I talked to her about booking a conference room for the class. “You really need to make the secretaries go to that.” Of course, the secretaries had other ideas. “Too bad you can’t get my attorney to go to training,” one of them said to me. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff he sends people.” The IT department was also at the top of everyone’s list of people who could use training. “No one knows what those people are trying to say,” one attorney complained. “I mean, what the hell is an Exchange Server? Why can’t they just speak English?”

By the time the first class met I had pulled together a lot of material. My plan was to open by talking about the importance of effective communication at work and the ways in which communication had changed since we started to depend so heavily on email. I also had what I hoped were entertaining examples of spelling and grammar mistakes and quick suggestions about how to avoid them. I had the PowerPoint slides that are all but mandatory for any presentation these days. But it turned out that all I really needed was a little exercise that I had planned as an icebreaker. Having divided the class into small groups, I asked them to work together to come up with a list of problems they had seen in other people’s emails: things that annoyed them, things that were rude, things that made their writers look “less than smart,” as I tried to phrase it diplomatically.

We never even got to the second half of my agenda. “Less than smart” me, I should have realized from the beginning how much people love to complain. I couldn’t get them to stop talking. Everyone was having so much fun and they were coming up with such comprehensive lists of things that they hated in email that I decided that it was just best to let their discussion take over most of the class. By the time we went over their lists and everyone explained why the items on them were problems, our time was up. But we had also covered almost all of the items on my agenda, and it felt to me like the most organic teaching experience of my life. I’d never experienced a subject that just seemed to teach itself this way, and I was pleased that everyone seemed to be having such a good time discussing an important topic.

“See, you already know this stuff,” I said to the class, summing things up as I prepared to let them go back to work and their email accounts. “You just need to slow down a little and take some time to think about your messages before you hit the ‘send’ button.” They all nodded in agreement as they finished filling out their evaluation forms for the class (which were all excellent, by the way). I tidied up the room and closed down my laptop as people straggled out the door. Eventually the only person left was Bob, the supervisor whose problematic emails had prompted us to create the class in the first place.

“Hey Corby, I just wanted to thank you and tell you that this class was great,” he said once everyone had left. At that moment I was sure that this was going to be one of those moments trainers live for, one of those times when you just know that you’ve really gotten through to someone who needed your help. “Some of the people who work for me really needed this,” he confided. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff they write.”

This book is for all the Bobs out there. And I’m afraid that we’re all Bobs, convinced that everyone else is committing email atrocities while we’re communicating effectively and charming all of our correspondents with our sparkling wit. I think that I’m generally a pretty good writer, but I know that I’m much more aware of what I’m doing since I’ve spent time thinking about how our writing can derail good communication. So pull up a seat and pay attention. Trust me, you don’t want to be Bob.