Most people who have been using electronic communications for a while will know what this means. An innocently written email which comes over completely the wrong way to the recipient and causes a dreadful missunderstanding that was never intended.
The point was brought home to me recently in an email exchange with a good friend of mine -
Matt Paines - when I made a comment that I figured he would find funny, and had I said it face to face I'm sure he would. Not so. Although thankfully a short telephone call (not that there is such a thing with Matt) soon repaired the damage.
The trouble is that electronic communication channels have grown explosively, but the associated ettiquette has a lot of catching up to do. People say things in emails that they would never say face to face, and things that might be OK said face to face take on a completely different significance when staring at you from the sterile intimacy of your inbox.
Translate this into a business environment and you start to see the potentially corrosive effect that this sort of thing can have on morale and the working environment in general. It doesn't have to be the big fallouts - the cummulative effect of cold impersonal emails over a period of time can be far greater.
That's why we've built in specific questions ito all our
360 feedback questionnaires about how people communicate via email - because we think it's important. And hopefully in time to come the email fallout will become a thing of the past.
Labels: email ettiquette
See us at the Regional CIPD conference in Coventry on 8 October where we will be giving online demonstrations of our 360 degree feedback system and our new Custom360 White Label online tool.
The theme of the event will be Tools for Developing Individuals and Organisations and has a special focus on online learning and development. Speakers include:-
- James Pennington from the B2B Centre
- Nicola Hughes from The Jump Start Company
- Kimberley Hare from Kaizen Training
- Steve Barden and John Helmer from Epic
