Have you ever thought about your personal email style? Are you someone who pours out lengthy thoughts into email messages to colleagues? Or someone who treats email more like a telegram, keeping them as short as possible? Whatever your email style is, you probably think it’s the right one, but you may be unknowingly annoying your colleagues and getting in the way of the results you want.
Here are eight of the most common ways people’s email habits set their co-workers on edge.
[See: Relaxation Exercises for When You’re About to Lose It at Work.]
Being overly brusque. Email is an informal medium and it’s often used for efficiency — which leads some people to be so concise that it comes across to colleagues as abrasive or even rude. For example, if a co-worker sends you an informative message with a warm, friendly tone and you simply reply “OK,” in many office cultures that will come across as brusque at best. Take the extra 10 seconds and type out: “Makes sense — thanks for this” or anything else that’s longer than two letters.
Sending emails that are far too lengthy. It’s pretty rare that an email truly needs to contain more than a few paragraphs of information, and if you routinely send long, wordy emails, it’s pretty likely that some of your recipients will start tuning out. If you need to communicate a large amount of information, email probably isn’t the way to do it.
Sending emails where it’s not clear what you’re asking the recipient to do. Your recipient should be able to very quickly tell what you need in response: Do you need information or input? Do you need the person to take a particular action? Just give you an update? Most people get an enormous number of emails, and if they have to spend time trying to figure out exactly what you’re asking of them, your email is likely to go to the bottom of their priority list.
[See: 8 Tacky Job Search Faux Pas.]
Sending emails that are hard to reply to. Most of the time, effective emails can be answered quickly with just a few sentences. If your recipient isn’t going to be able to reply without writing out a lengthy response or without engaging in multiple rounds of back and forth with you, email probably isn’t the correct medium for the conversation; in that case, pick up the phone or talk in person.
Requesting read receipts. Yes, it can be handy to know when someone has read your email, but in most cases requesting a read receipt will come across as if you don’t trust the person to handle their email appropriately. It’s a good way of signaling “I don’t trust you to do your job and be appropriately communicative.” Certainly if you have an ongoing problem with someone not responding to or remembering emails, that’s something you should address — but in most cases, read receipts aren’t the way to do it. And speaking of appearing not to trust your colleagues …
Copying your co-worker’s manager on an email without cause. There are definitely times when it’s appropriate to copy your recipient’s manager, like if you haven’t been able to get the problem resolved by talking with the person directly or when the manager has specifically asked to be kept in the loop. But if you regularly copy managers because you think it will prompt the recipient to act on your message more quickly, you’re pretty likely to annoy not only your co-workers, but their managers too (since they’ve delegated work to their staff members for a reason). Unless there’s a specific reason not to, you should default to trust that your co-workers will be responsive to you without asking their managers to observe the interaction.
[See: How to Follow Up on a Job Application Without Being Annoying.]
Replying-all unnecessarily. If you’ve ever had your inbox fill up with dozens of replies to a mass email (especially one about something fairly trivial), you know why you should avoid using reply-all unless the whole group truly needs to read your response. And yet, more than 20 years after email came into popular use, offices are still battling epic reply-all failures that flood people’s mailboxes.
Getting heated or snarky in an email. Email is tremendously useful for many things — but it’s not well-suited to conflict. It’s easy for your tone to come across much more harshly than it would in person, you’re not seeing the other person face-to-face or hearing their voice so it’s easier to get more worked up than you normally would, and a written record of the conflict will live on forever (and can be forwarded). For all of these reasons, if you sense yourself becoming frustrated or otherwise emotional, that’s a sign to back away from your email and have a real conversation.
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Are Your Emails Annoying Your Co-Workers? originally appeared on usnews.com
