How To: Write an Email that Doesn’t Suck
By: Patrick Glace
Tags: Productivity, Workplace Humor, Writing, Workplace Culture, Email

Email has redefined how we get work done. It’s a building block for our global economy and one of our greatest tools in the workplace.

There are books written about proper etiquette, blogs about how to write one, and coping mechanisms developed to help you manage them.

I’m adding to the content stack today with some advice on how to make them suck less. So, here it goes.

Earlier this week, my boss asked me to help him re-write a dry and boring email about a process improvement our division is working to implement. He’s a strong technical writer, but wanted to introduce some humor to the message. I said, sure, I’ll take a look and try to cook something up.

This is what I came up with:

Friends and Colleagues, Almost a year ago, we sat together and decided our approach to meetings sucked. They’re clumsy, long, and sometimes completely unnecessary. Most of the time, though, they’re well intentioned. So, we thought, let’s put our heads together and make this a better, more productive process for everyone — thinking that if we lead this effort, our organization will take note. Our small but mighty working group outlined what we believe a good meeting feels like, for both leaders and participants. So we set out to create a culture of productive meetings, that puts time back on our calendars, increases productivity, reduces stress, and ultimately improves our work-life balance. Lucky for us, we have some folks on staff that know a thing or two about research and process improvement. We asked [helpful colleague] and [second helpful colleague] to give us a hand so we could get a baseline for what our people think about how we meet. Generally, what the data said is we meet too much and of those meetings, most of ’em kinda suck. Here are the cold hard facts over a three-month period based on your responses: - Average of 118 meetings, some saying they had 400 during the period - Average of 180 hours spent meeting, 700 was the highest number in this category — yikes! - 71% said they have back-to-back meetings on their calendars– we hope you don’t have to pee! It’s also interesting to note that when asked how we feel about our meeting frequency on a scale of 100, 0 being not enough and 100 too many, the average was 70. Not horrible, but we think there’s room to improve. To wrap this up I’m going to invite you to participate in a meeting — I know, this is not a joke — but I’m calling it an experience because we’re going to make sure it doesn’t suck. We plan to have multiple sessions of this not-meeting experience in late March and we hope to launch our initiative in redefining how we meet on April 1st. We’re hoping everyone takes it seriously, so we may consider bumping this to the 2nd. We’ll see. Maybe we can meet on that this week?

Now, most people say that short, direct emails are best. I agree, usually.

Generally, I’m a direct person — sometimes too direct — but with a message like this, I thought telling a story would help this information get across in a meaningful, relatable way.

Here is the formula I followed:

How do you feel about the subject? Starting here is where you’ll find the truth, at least your version of it. In this case, our work surrounding meeting practice improvements is long overdue. The audience for this message was our division of about 25 people we know and work with on a daily basis.

Write like a human being. Most of our professional electronic communication is robotic, lacking emotion and authenticity. In this example, our perspective was this: we know that how we approach meetings sucks, we just need somebody bold enough to say it so we can all exhale. Also, humor is the great equalizer.

Data is still important. Yes, your survey results are important, but how you share them is too. Nobody wants to read about “respondents,” they want the facts, but they want them in a way that isn’t clinical.

Tell the story. You need to tie this all together in a way that gets your point across, tells your audience why it’s important, and ultimately, what’s going to happen next. If you do this well, you will find that people are more inclined to engage with you.

So, if you’re writing an email about something terribly boring that most of your team won’t enjoy reading, I encourage you to rethink your approach, take a chance, and tell your story.

Patrick Glace is a writer, photographer, and marketing expert that writes emails for a living. If you’re interested in sending him one, he’s eager to respond.