Email is a staple of the modern business workplace. A new employee can find that it’s easy to make dozens of simple mistakes. An experienced employee can find that they aren’t as effective or efficient as their job requires them to be. The trouble is that all of these rules of communication are unwritten and seemingly inaccessible. To help us raise our email “game,” Chris Fenning provides this concise guide to realize our best intentions and goals.
I’ve learned many of these tips by experience throughout the years. (Top-flight colleagues can teach a lot.) However, I, too, recognized many of the pitfalls from past workplace experience. Despite this past record, Fenning showed me several new, specific ways that I can improve. For instance, I can more deliberately summarize people into the conversation when I add them to emails. Or I can more explicitly define the urgency of requests. I suspect anyone reading this book can identify at least a handful of these actionable steps to improve their daily trek through their inbox. Practiced with discipline over time, that can yield a cornucopia of fruit.
Fenning organizes this book into four sections. The first section covers the subject and the introduction; the second, formatting; the third, group emails; and the fourth, miscellaneous tips. Because this book is essentially a compilation of advice, most people will undoubtedly find only some of the tips helpful. Nonetheless, the reminders – and importantly the explanations behind the reminders – can help us maintain good habits while bettering our other habits. Even a few percentage points of enhanced impact can have notable effect over time.
As always, some limitations exist. I’m interested in how newer technologies like Slack could be discussed in depth. Some advice (e.g., about plain-text emails) seems increasingly dated as technology advances. At 145 pages, this book is extremely concise; perhaps a few more stories of successes and mishaps might liven up the reader’s encounter.
Anyone seriously engaged in business communications over email can benefit from reading this book. Either new employees first learning about workplace culture or experienced leaders trying to dig themselves out of mountains of messages can implement a few suggestions to see real improvement. Good communication can impress “higher ups” in the organization. Importantly for senior leaders, it can also enhance effectiveness and improve efficiency. An important aspect of a career is controlling things that you can control. This work shows us how to do that with email so that we can be better positioned to take opportunities ahead.
Effective Emails: The Secret to Straightforward Communication at Work
By Chris Fenning
Copyright (c) 2022
Alignment Group
ISBN13 9781838244064
Page Count: 145
Genre: Business, Communications
www.amazon.com