Are Your Coworkers Ignoring Your Emails?
Sudipto Chanda, PMP, CSPO
Project Management | Organizational Scaling and Growth | Innovation Strategist
3 ways to get their attention and response
As people were walking into the meeting room, I took a moment to scan my inbox.
A single email with the subject, Architecture discussion, from Kenji (I love a clean inbox). Just two words in the body of the email, “Please approve”, followed by a long discussion thread.
I scrolled up and down, trying to grasp the context and figure out what was I supposed to approve. I was interrupted by Naomi, asking if she could start the presentation. I nodded, closed my MacBook and turned my attention to the screen.
Two days later, Kenji popped into my office and asked if there was anything wrong with his request? He was expecting an urgent approval.
He explained that he had sent me an email requesting approval for a new computer for testing. I searched through my inbox and found the email in question. I asked him to sit down and gently explained to him that I couldn’t approve the request because I didn’t have all the information. He protested that we had had a long discussion, and I had agreed to approve.
I took a deep breath and explained again — I needed the email to be drafted differently. Here is what I suggested:
Subject: Request for approval of desktop for testing
Body: Please approve the purchase of a desktop for $#### (invoice and specs attached). We need this because:
* (a couple of bullets summarizing our prior discussions)
I noticed the frown on Kenji’s face as if I was wasting his time by asking him to redo the email. He reluctantly went back and sent me the request again.
Kenji failed to appreciate the fact that not only I needed the information for the approval, but I also had to mark a CC to IT and Finance so that they could process the request. If the email weren’t easy to grasp, they would come back, asking for more information adding further delays.
Why are most emails so badly structured?
Most emails are just sentences thrown together without much thought. To make it worse, these emails don’t explicitly state the expectation from the reader, or it is hidden somewhere in the text.
Years ago, one of my mentors taught me how to structure emails. He was heading a large business group, and he received a lot of business-critical information and approval requests over emails.
He explained that the expectation from the receiver should be the first thing in the email, followed by a summary. More details could follow or be added as attachments. This not only saves time but also helps to organize your inbox . Information-only emails could be a low priority, while emails for critical decisions need immediate attention.
Over the years, I have made it my habit to structure my emails in a way which requires the least effort to comprehend, while explicitly stating the request from the reader.
Here are some ideas which have worked for me:
1. First, explicitly state your expectations
If you pick up one idea from this article, this is the big one.
Right after your greeting, state the purpose of the email and your expectations from the recipient.
It is often tempting to provide the context, justification and other details before stating the expectation from the receiver. We don’t want to be too direct. We feel uncomfortable asking for anything.
If you want the recipients to pay attention and take action at the earliest, you need to be pretty clear about what you want them to do. Otherwise, your email will end up in the black hole of read-but-not-responded-to emails.
Here are some examples of clear requests
You can then go on with your supporting details.
Remember the reading comprehension guidelines from your school? One of the strategies was to read the questions first, so you are primed to look for the answers while reading the passage.
Stating the purpose of the email helps recipients read the details with the clear intention of responding to the request. Often the recipients may not read the full details as they may already know enough to respond.
2. Use headings and bullets
Nobody likes to read a wall of text. With information being fed to us like pretty pills in attractive packages via social media, YouTube or Buzzfeed articles , your email has a pretty low chance of grabbing attention.
The only reason you get a click is that you have a formal relationship with the reader — you are a colleague. This privilege does not guarantee attention span or timely response, so don’t take it for granted.
Attention can be garnered by using a few headings and bulleted lists.
We sometimes forget that modern email is not plain text but allows rich text content. Whether we are using Outlook or Gmail, you have enough formatting options to choose from.
Headings allow the reader to go with two passes. First, they can glance the headings, and then they can decide to read the details of the sections they are interested in. Avoid multi-level headings, but no harm is marking your email with a heading appropriate for the context, such as Summary, Supporting Details, or, Design Overview, Colour Scheme etc.
Bullets have a different effect—they breakdown the text reducing cognitive load while allowing for phrases rather than full sentences. Using phrases in paragraphs is just bad grammar. Phrases in bullets are perfectly fine. As a bonus for you as the writer, your effort is reduced when you use bullets.
2. Write a better subject line
The subject line of an email is often an afterthought. We don’t pay much attention to it. We delude ourselves that people read every one of our emails. We forget that we are competing with hundreds of other emails, social media feeds and even medium stories for the reader’s attention.
We sometimes change the context of the email but not change the subject line. As in the example above, the email thread had a subject line, Architecture Discussion, but then Kenji forwarded the same email to request for approval without changing the subject line.
Next time, pause before you hit send. Take a few extra seconds to write an appropriate subject line. Pay special attention if you are replying or forwarding and ask yourself if the subject line is still relevant. If not, change it.
The first few words of a subject line are the most important. Even if the subject line is truncated in a column view or on a smartphone, it should help your email get noticed. Here are some subject starters you can use to garner attention:
In a nutshell
We can blame our coworkers for ignoring our emails as much as we want, but that gets us nowhere. In this world of limited attention span, everyone struggles to keep up endless requests for our time and brain cycles.
We can do our part in reducing the cognitive overload of our fellow humans by:
I am sure your coworkers will thank you for respecting their time.
Originally published by author on Medium.com .
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