In this newsletter’s greatest hit, I told you how to run a meeting—noting, of course, the truism that many, many meetings could have been emails. We’ll get to the writing of said emails in a moment, but first I want to note that there is a small subset of emails that should have been meetings.
If you are a supervisory sort of person and it’s, say, 5 pm on a Friday, do not write an email to your direct report asking them to meet with you at 10 am on Tuesday. Or even Monday. Just don’t.
If they’re still at their desk or their cubicle or in front of their remote work spot computer, just walk over there (or call or ping them or whatever) and say what you have to say or ask them to join you briefly. Really. Unless it’s your goal to make your employee spend the weekend having panic attacks, just don’t write that email (if that is your goal, please take some time to consider your life choices). And if you absolutely must, take a cue from the childcare providers of the nation and lead with “It’s nothing bad.”
And now on to how to write those emails that should be emails!
Be brief
Nobody has time to read stuff. I don’t even know why you’re reading this newsletter.
Skip your preamble. Omit needless words. Cover the who what where when why how up front. Then stop, except for the thanks part (next).
Thank people
You know that praise publicly, reprimand privately thing? Here’s a great place to practice the first part. If you’ve got people to single out for thanks for their work, you can take up a few more words to do so. If you don’t have specific people to thank for specific things, just thank everyone. Let me repeat that: Thank everyone every time.1 Your organization works because your staff do. The least you can do is thank them (though it’d be nice if you could give them a raise, too).
Specify actions; delegate jobs
Remember how you tied up your meeting by repeating who was going to do what by when? Do that in your email, too!
Check before you send
Did you include the attachment? Did you get the date and time right? (Did you include the date and time?) Nobody wants to get a followup email that they then need to save along with the original email. We have all forgotten to check before we send and doubtless will again, but, you know, try.
So that’s it. Those are my suggestions. They’re probably too long for an email, but I don’t claim to be perfect.
I would encourage you to thank people in person, too, and frequently. When I was in college, I worked for Campus Patrol, a student-run outfit that protected people like you from people like us. There were three shifts a night, approximately three hours each, and every single shift the supervisor went around and met up with every single patroller to thank them for working. If you worked all three shifts, the supervisor came out to thank you three times. Back when I worked with people directly, I did my best to do the same.