By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide
Email is the most passive/aggressive form of communication on earth, rivaled only by monitoring incoming phone calls via an answering machine. Email, like its technological predecessor voicemail, gives us the ability to leave a message without having to actually communicate face-to-face...so you can drop a gigantic stink-bomb in someone's inbox without having to deal with the actual effects until a later presumably more convenient time.
Don't get me wrong-I get somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 emails a day (yes, some of them are Viagra spams), and email is probably the most essential tool for communication within the workspace because its convenience. But there are some issues that one should always keep in mind, particularly if one is overly-reliant on email.
First off, email does not show the intended tone of the writer very well. In literary criticism, there is the time-honored idea called the "Fallacy of Intent" that is, the intent of an author in creating the writing is irrelevant to the meaning of the words themselves. The "artifact" that is the message exists without authoritarian meaning...it is imbued with meaning by the reader.
Over the years I have seen it literally thousands of time: a well-meaning email writer is shocked to find out that their carefully crafted note about the bake sale or how good a co-worker looks after a diet is met by the recipient with anger, disgust, and offense. Sometimes it's the interpretation of tonal nuance, sometimes its inadvertent capitalization (YELLING in email), sometimes it's punctuation!!!!
Often the nicest, clearest, and seemingly factual mails hit a nerve in the reader causing anger, confusion, and frustration...a situation which could have been entirely avoided by taking the time to pick up the phone, or by sticking your head over the top of your cubicle. The non-verbal nuances and cues in communication taken from tone of voice and facial expression are lost in email (thus the odd emoticon phenomenon), and sometimes old-fashioned talking is better when there are sensitive matters to communicate.
Another issue with email is that writing persists long after the fact. Casual communication in speech literally flies away into the air after the communication event. Email, as the both the Clinton and Bush White Houses have found, stays put. Emails between friends listing out grievances, for instance, remain as evidence of the problem long after the event loses relevance-email keeps old pain fresh. And probably unnecessarily so - humans evolved where cooperative work was essential, the passing of grievances and the ability to forgive and forget are necessary to any cooperative venture. That is why you need to be very careful of what you type in emails, because it just stays there and hampers mending. It can also turn up in lawsuits, in your personnel folder, and sometimes, on the Internet.
Then there is the "oops" factor with email. In an incident while I was working at Microsoft, a co-worker sent a mail detailing my pathetic attempts to grow a beard. In it, he speculated that my rear-end must be similarly hairless. He thought it would be funny to add the expression "Jay's Mom and Dad" to the to: line, and the rest is history. The Microsoft email system interpreted the word "DAD" as the "Desktop Application Division," fully one third of Microsoft. Suffice it to say, the issue of my backside was the talk of Microsoft for a couple of days.
Ah the fond memories. But that’s all behind me now.
So, if you need to email go right ahead, but this in mind: when in doubt, pick up a phone, or better yet dare to leave your desk and actually talk with someone-it's still the best form of communication.
