Surviving the email revolution

Email has changed the way we communicate.  It’s easy, effortless, fast, powerful and virtually free, and it laughs at geographical boundaries.  It enables us to send a one-line quip or a 200-page document at the click of a button, to one person or a thousand. 
     But to many of us, it’s becoming a curse.  Unwanted, irrelevant messages bombard us as we try to concentrate on our work.  Spam rains unbidden on to our screens.  More seriously, a moment’s thoughtlessness or the spark of anger can turn the power of email against us in a moment – costing us money, leaving us with egg on our faces or even, on occasion, losing us our jobs, our friends, our partners. 
     Trouble is, email is just TOO easy - so easy that its use is more than doubling every year.  We are now sending around 40 billion emails a day, and the increase is accelerating towards meltdown. 
     Failure to cope with the resulting overload is causing horrific stress problems.  It is also wasting money on a heroic scale – one company reckons that the 18 million emails a year its employees handle are costing it more than £900,000. 
     Taking control of the situation is essential if you want to equip yourself for the modern world. 
     Email can give you more work than you can cope with, but - worse than that - it can also put you out of work; it can even render you unemployable.  And it can do this in many cunning ways.
     You may remember Jo Moore, special adviser to the Department of Trade & Industry, who was forced to resign after she sent an email in the aftermath of 9/11 saying that it was ‘a good day to bury bad news’.  She could of course have expressed this sentiment without email, but it is much less likely that her lack of judgement would have been exposed. 
     Ms Moore is just one of many people who have got into hot water at work through a thoughtless or intemperate use of email.  In other cases, email is used as a weapon to chastise, threaten staff or even dismiss staff – easy for the sender, highly stressful for the recipient.
     Essex’ s Chief Constable declared Wednesdays an ‘email-free day’ because he was concerned that his staff had forgotten how to talk to people face to face.  John Caudwell, boss of Phones 4U, banned his 2500 staff from using email, estimating that it will save each employee three hours a day - and his company £1m a month.

Here are some tips for practising safe ‘clicks’:

 ·   Don’t use email to deal with a confrontational matter if a friendly chat on the phone or in person would be better. 
·   Leave to the ‘to’ field blank until you’re happy with your message – that way, it can’t go until you’re sure.
·   If your email is sensitive or critical, don’t send it straight away - just let it sit there for an hour or two while you cool off and get on with something else. 
·   If you get a rude, aggressive or demanding email, don’t rise to the bait, and don’t sink to the other person’s level.  A courteous reply will put the other person in the wrong and may even elicit an apology.
·   Never copy new people in on an email exchange unless you’re sure the recipient won’t mind the whole exchange being seen by someone else. 
·   Never mix business messages with gossip, let alone personal criticism.    

SOME EMAIL HORROR STORIES

• In 2003, 11 workers from British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) were sacked and a further 20 disciplined for sending ‘inappropriate emails’.  This followed an earlier incident in which nine workers were suspended over a crude email which contained an indelicately altered image of cartoon hero Bart Simpson.

• Bob Clarke, a sales executive from Magor, Gwent, was sacked by TXU Energi after emailing a joke, sent to him by his son, which portrayed Arab women as ugly.  He won his claim for unfair dismissal, but was told he should have known better.

• When recruitment manager John Crook emailed his operations manager to recommend a female colleague for a pay rise, the manager asked him why.  He emailed back to say that the woman worked hard and had an excellent recruitment rate - and added that she was a ‘great shag’.  The manager’s PA saw the email and made a complaint, and Crook was dismissed for gross misconduct. 

• One executive's PA checked his email to find that nine colleagues had circulated obscene e-mails about her.  She felt her complaint was not treated seriously, so she resigned.  She got a £10,000 out-of-court settlement.

• The Los Angeles Times fired a reporter for sending a critical email to his congressman, because he used his work email account.  

• When careers advisor Sharon Dyson sent a ‘private’ email to her boyfriend from her office desktop she made some intimate remarks and went on to add an insulting reference to a client.  She accidentally clicked on ‘reply all’ – so the email immediately went to all 30 recipients of her boyfriend’s email to her.  Many of them were so entertained by the message that they forwarded it to their friends, causing huge embarrassment all round and getting her into hot water.

How it can all go wrong

WHAT YOU SENT WAS...   WHAT THEY GOT WAS...
Straight to the point     Rude and confrontational Friendly                         Over-familiar
Sarcastic or ironic        Taken literally
Funny                            Tasteless, crude
An affectionate jibe      A racist/sexist/ageist insult
A gentle reprimand       A slap in the face          
An urgent request         An aggressive demand
Informative                   Longwinded
Diplomatic                     Waffle                       
Gossip                            An appalling indiscretion Confidential  Immediately copied to the whole company  

What matters is not what your message means to you but what it means to the recipient.   The same applies to all human intercourse of course - but with email the other person is invisible, so there is no rapport to guide the exchange.

Avoiding ambiguity
Human conversation is much more subtle than a simple exchange of words.  We convey infinite shades of meaning to each other by our tone of voice, emphasis, body language, and by what we don’t say.  With email, the words are all you have.  So they need to be clear - see the plain English page.  

Practical hints  

• Use the title box to summarise what you’re saying – not just ‘MEETING’ but ‘Can you meet me on  Tuesday at 3pm?’ 

• When the subject of an email conversation changes, change the ‘Re:’ heading to suit – otherwise you will struggle to identify the email later when you need the information in it.  

• Don’t become a ‘spammer’ by copying in whole groups of people who don’t need to see the message.  Use courteous, not over-familiar language – slang and ‘texting’ is much more open to misinterpretation.  

• Avoid fancy fonts and big text in emails because the reader, just like you, will be sitting right in front of the screen and will find, also just like you, that the easiest and quickest text to read in most fonts is black, no more than 12 point.  

• DON’T CAPITALISE LONG PASSAGES OF TEXT.  IT’S THE WRITTEN EQUIVALENT OF SHOUTING, IT LOOKS ‘IN YOUR FACE’ AND IT MAKES YOUR WORDS HARDER TO READ.

• If you must use colour, use it sparingly and in a consistent, disciplined way, eg make all the headings blue.

• The MD of one small business I know looks at every email sent by all his staff - and he makes sure they know he does it.  It's a great way to make sure they don't send inappropriate messages or waste time on non-company business, and it gives him a useful overview of the firm's day-to-day dealings.  
  
  “People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is!  Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style” – Matthew Arnold