Good Communication

Communication plays a vital role in the investigation of a problem. If the communication is bad, this adds to the problem considerably, making it take much more time and effort, and sometimes end up not having the best solution. This is most noticeable when the language of communication is not the mother language of some of the parties involved in the communication, or when some people, even native speakers, are a bit careless when communicating.

Most of the communication that takes place between different team members, especially if some of them are located in different places is through emails. In this post I would like to share with you the steps that I follow to make sure my emails satisfy what I believe can be considered as good communication.

Well, I have been told several times by my leaders and teammates that I write good emails and I have good communication with our customers, so I feel a bit qualified to give my thoughts on this matter.

The steps are as follows:

- Make sure the email satisfies its main purpose by discussing fully and only the point under discussion, and not branching to some irrelevant topics. This would keep the discussion focused, efficient and quick.

- Make sure nothing mentioned may have double meaning, and hence cause confusion. I try to put myself in the shoes of the recipients and try to foresee how each point of my email may be conceived by them.

- Make sure the email is grammatically correct, the most suitable vocabulary are used, and the punctuation is correct. This is really important in the quality of the email, maybe as important as the technical details. And this is actually the main point I wanted to emphasise in this short article and the one that triggered my need to write the article in the first place. A lot of important information and details are lost due to the poorly-written language, leading to the problem mentioned in the first paragraph of this short article.

- Provide all the details I might think of that might help in the investigation of the problem under discussion, even if it seemed at the first glance it didn't have much to do with that problem. Sometimes, the solution lies where you aren't looking.

I hope that was helpful. Your comments are welcome.