Yesterday evening I read an email sent by a very senior manager in the company and looking at the way it was composed and formatted I was shocked. How can people be so ignorant as to use caps and red colour for a very simple sentence?? So, that set me to search material on Email Etiquettes on the www. I did hit upon some very informative pieces.
I must confess here that as a part of my job I send very informal mails to team members using wierd colours/fonts/images, and some of them are toooooo wierd to even think that they can be official! Well, jokes apart, formal mails call for following some basic rules nad norms. And here I was gathering information to educate people in my organization, which believe me is a very tough job. All managers think that they are know-alls! So, the information had to be convincing and yet not rude.I did compile my own list of Do's and Do Not's and circulated the same. But, all that while I was wondering how tiny things overlooked can annoy others. Someone once said to me, "Most literate people are not educated". I could not help but relate the situation with those words. Making old economy or even current tech savvy generations computer literate does not essentially mean that they are now gurus of the e-world. 
I have come across old men with laptops who do not even know how to set 'Print Area' in a worksheet! And these are the people who make strategies in the board rooms and play with data!!! I donot mean to be rude here but the computer institutes that have sprung up like mushrooms must also stress on this.
This research on Email Etiquettes has made me look at every email I come across with a raised brow. Well, as for my team members hope they do put the info to some use.
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1 comment:
Hey, thanks for leaving a comment on my blog. your blog is interesting too. I assume you work in HR ( recruitment or people ?)
Etiquette is so very missing in Indian firms. Sometimes it seems to me people never went to school !
As dilbert puts it across, people rise to their level of incompetence. I have seen this again and again, and your post here is just another answer. I think the problem is also to do with Outlook which makes it easy to make emails look flashy. If everyone had to write mail in text only mode, I think their skills will increase !
I think that people who worked in opensource communities ( like linux ) have better etiquettes. The community makes sure that you are brow beaten and make the changes, and they dont care whether you are the boss or a fresher.
I run a group of 500+ people called bikenomads . We are riders, and i still have to enforce the rules again and again. Fortunately, I am the boss there ;)
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