Rating:

In a hurry?  Recommendation    Product Preview/Demo

• Training on email has great value
• The training video covers how to manage and write email
• Playful, but tries to cover too much

As long as email is a primary medium of business communication, it deserves close attention as a skill. It's a medium that requires good writing skills. Unfortunately, the consensus in the business world is that employee writing skills are woefully inadequate.

THE STATE OF WRITING
The New York Times published an article in 2004, "What Corporate America Can't Build: A Sentence," that focused on email. The article would be hilarious if it weren't such a depressing comment on the ability of people to express themselves in writing.

Here's an email quoted in the article:

I updated the Status report for the four discrepancies Lennie forward us via e-mail (they in Barry file).. to make sure my logic was correct It seems we provide Murray with incorrect information ... However after verifying controls on JBL - JBL has the indicator as B ???? - I wanted to make sure with the recent changes - I processed today - before Murray make the changes again on the mainframe to 'C'.

The writer is a systems analyst at a high tech company. She comes off sounding like a nearly illiterate high school dropout.

Recently, I taught a class, Persuading Business Audiences, for second-year students at Harvard Business School. We did an email exercise, and some of the results weren't pretty. I'm not dissing the students; they signed up for the course because they wanted to improve their writing and presenting skills. But if HBS students struggle with the clarity and conciseness email requires, I am guessing that many businesspeople do too.

Understandably, there are many complaints about email. There’s too much of it, messages are too long or too short, the medium invites sloppy writing and hasty messages that writers later regret ("later" sometimes means 15 seconds after clicking the Send button.)

IT PAYS TO TRAIN
Despite the complaints, an air of "so what?" seems to envelop how people use email and how well they write messages. I suppose that good writing skills aren't compelling enough on their own. In business you always need a compelling "business case."

Well, there is one for improving employees' ability to write well in email or any other medium.

First of all, business people are probably doing more writing than they ever have before. This period of time should be the golden era of writing skills in business. Email and many other digital media are text based, which means that writing is the primary skill they require. Many employees spend much of their days reading and writing emails.

You'd think that companies would want to ensure that the people they are paying have the tools they need to do their jobs well.

Second, the level of writing skill in an organization can have an impact, positive or negative, on the bottom line.

One confusing email sent to a large number of unlucky recipients can add hours of wasted time to overhead costs. Think about it. An email as badly written as the one in the Times story is sent to 500 people. The email seems to announce a major policy change--or maybe it doesn't.

What’s going to happen? Some of the recipients are going to reply with questions. The person who sent out the original message may have to respond piecemeal to a deluge of emails until he or she realizes there's a problem.

Many of the recipients will pick up the phone and call a friend. They’ll grouse and scratch their heads. Maybe they'll figure it out what the email means, or maybe the memo will make a good springboard for complaining about the person who wrote the email--"That guy in the legal department has no idea how to communicate with humans"--or about the whole organization--"it's just shows you how badly this place is run!"

Finally, some number of recipients will just hit the Delete button. They figure that if the policy change is important, someone will tell them.

Now imagine that this situation is repeated many times in a year. The potential cost is staggering. And the cost is insidious because the accounting system isn't likely to identify the cause.

VIDEO FROM UK
As you might expect, the web offers an abundance of advice on writing email. You'll find examples here, here, here, and here.

If you want something more compelling than a list of tips, consider e.asywriter: Using Email Effectively, a CD from Supernova Learning Solutions in the UK. It's a playful video built around the bad email habits of a young professional woman.

The instruction includes how to manage email and how to write effective messages. The content doesn't offer any surprising ideas, but it does cover a lot of ground--too much, I think.

Coverage of email management includes how to reduce message clutter so that you can pick out the really important ones. The coverage of planning and composing messages is anchored by an acronym, IMPACT. (Even the British like acronyms in their training videos.)

The "I" stands for Intention. When writing an email, you first need to think through the purpose you want the message to achieve. The final letter of IMPACT stands for Them: you need to read your message from the reader's point of view before you send it.

Overall, the advice is sound. I think the video tries to cover too much, however--a common problem with training videos. The craft of writing emails deserves more attention. The presentation is confusing in places because it mixes points about management and writing.

You’ll learn something just by watching the video. A more effective use is group training, including practice writing. For that you will need to provide substantial facilitation. We didn't receive the user's guide that comes in the package so I can't say how helpful it is in organizing the teaching.

Recommendation
For anyone who wants to improve the quality of email communication, e.asywriter: Using Email Effectively is worth a look. It can do some good as a stand-alone resource for individuals as well as a foundation for an in-house seminar to improve skills.

At current exchange rates, the program costs about $1,500, and that's expensive for a training video in the U.S.

See the review of The Truth about Email for another video on the subject.

e.asywriter Rating