Jim and the 3 Etiquette of Outlook

           In a time not so long ago, in a land very distant though, Jim started working as an apprentice to the city’s best carpenter. He would walk five miles each day to get to the workshop and toil away for hours, giving shape to the lifeless pieces of wood stacked up in the corner. He was fascinated with making tables and chairs and loved that his work required so much precision. He would spend endless hours honing his skills and often marveled at the output of his own work. The workshop’s biggest client was a local business in the next town owned by a wealthy merchant, who incidentally loved to collect uniquely carved furniture. At the end of each assignment, Jim would load the finely crafted tables in the local carriage and travelled hundreds of miles to deliver them. Besides his work, Jim also loved poetry and read the likes of Tennyson and Keats in his leisure. He would pick quotes from his favourite poems, carve them on a tablet, sign them with his name and leave them at the offices of the wealthy merchant, just as a gift. The wealthy merchant came to love these and wanted to thank him personally. He wrote a letter to express his gratitude, appended it with a return gift, wrapped it a beautiful cover and sent it to him.

A week later Jim received the letter, and upon reading it was so furious that he tossed it into the very fires he would sharpen his tools. Then he carefully crafted another wooden tablet for the wealthy merchant, this time on an eight by ten platform and sent it along with the usual assignments of the furniture.

The wealthy merchant opened the gift and was terribly shocked to find that instead of another lovely Tennyson quote, the tablet read MY NAME IS JIM. For the better half of the day,  he pondered what might have lead him to react the way he had. Arrogance, maybe even narcissism, the merchant inferred.

Then as he went and sat down on the very table that Jim had crafted, his eyes fell on the carbon copy of the letter he had drafted and knew instantly where he had gone wrong.

He had addressed the letter to Dear Kim!

Jim never sent him another gift.

 The world today is a much smaller place than what it was few decades ago, in fact, what it was a just a few years ago.

No, I am not claiming that the physical sizes of our planet is progressively shrinking and follow it up with a detailed write up on global warming here. I will leave that for the experts on the matter to commentate. But what I am saying is if the speed of sharing information is the measure of distance, then we are closer to each other than ever before. And global is the new local.

Increasingly, we are collaborating with colleagues across different physical locations and providing service to clienteles cutting through various time zones. It’s a given, therefore, that there is an exponential dependence on electronic emails and telephone based communications. Mode of communication asides, style of communication was and is a matter of significant importance, one that should be taken lightly at our own risks.

As a project professional working with stakeholders across different organisations, locations and hierarchical levels, in my experience there are some basic etiquettes of communication that should be maintained at all times, no matter how gruesome your day has been. That includes even if you have fought off a lion with your bare hands.

• Get the name right – What went wrong between the merchant and Jim ? Well, it was simplistic nature of the merchant’s callousness in addressing the letter to Kim, instead of Jim. Beyond that point, the content of the letter mattered very little to Jim. Making the tablet was hard work for Jim, and what was worse that he would sign them. So there really wasn’t any room for getting the name wrong.

People can be incredibly touchy with their names and that’s not questionable under any circumstances. Names are personal, names are identities! Spellings and pronunciations both are equally important, whether you are dealing with colleagues internally or clients outside of your organization.

We are all very busy and every email response is Urgent. Accepted. But that doesn’t give the liberty to spell someone’s name incorrectly. More often than not it’s a case of a simple copy-paste job, from either the email address or the signature. And even then if you can’t get it correct, time to question your nursery lessons.

It’s ok to falter on the pronunciations for difficult names. But at least make a visible ( or audible ) effort. You might be talking over the phone but there is still a human being on the other end. Make sure to spend a moment to apologise and get it right if you have not gotten it right the first time.

I have been asked – how will I know ? Trust me, you will always know.

• Meeting invites –

A ) You are trying to arrange a meeting. You check everyone’s calendar. You choose a slot that’s available to all. You send the invite. You get declines. You have no reason why. You send another one. And another decline. Yet again, you don’t know why.

Well, Outlook has this wonderful feature called – Edit Response while declining. It is there for a reason. And that reason is, we still haven’t mastered the art of reading minds. Therefore, if you are unable to attend a meeting, and more importantly so, where the slot in your calendar is available, add a comment. Whether the time doesn’t suit you or the agenda, is secondary. The organizer needs to know. If you have an assistant who does this on your behalf, make sure you brief them about it since they represent you. It’s not just about being polite, it’s the bare minimum of professional decorum. If you are declining from a handheld device and you don’t get an option to edit the response, make sure to leave a follow up note.

B) Do NOT send meeting invites with ambiguous subject lines. You are sure to receive a decline more often than not. Meeting invites should either be appended with or followed with an agenda for the invitees. You are expecting their time. You need to explain why. If you do not have a detailed agenda, a quick summary of the expectations from the call is the only alternative.

• Missing salutations / greetings :

Emails/instant chat messages have a tone. And whether or not, one recognizes it is irrelevant. Increasingly, missing salutations are becoming conspicuous by their absence and polite & simple greetings such as Good Morning / hope this email finds you in good health & spirit are fashionably redundant. One can argue that the style of communication is evolving. True, but it should evolve for the better.

 Choose for yourself, what would you prefer ?

• > An email that opens with

     Abhishek,

     The file is attached.

     Regards

• > Hi Abhishek,

                       Please find attached the document that you had requested for.

                       Regards

                  The first style seems like an verbal effort to call out the name of a person who isn’t paying attention. And via email!  That isn’t taken too kindly at times, even if you sign off the email with Kind Regards. If you wish to write an stern email, your wordings should be chosen carefully. There is a fine line in being assertive and aggressive.

                     There are humungous volumes of dos and donts available about communications on the internet. And there is definitely no – one size fits all solution.  You create your own image, you are responsible for your own brand.  Create it, tailor it, polish it, maintain it. Most importantly savour it.