Emails: 16 non-professional habits to rectify

In order to properly handle the daily flow of emails, (re) discover the mistakes to avoid when writing and sending your professional emails.

Wielding the quill and lyrical flights doesn’t make you an email professional. As Business Insider magazine recalls in one of its articles, there are certain mistakes to avoid if you want to communicate professionally and effectively with your interlocutors.

The Urgent Label: 

By wanting to prioritize your emails by systematically qualifying them as urgent, you risk tiring your interlocutors, who in the long run, will no longer pay attention to your requests.

Reserve urgent for high priority content. You will be sure that it will be dealt with immediately.

The Informal Tone:

Even if the nature of your relationship with the other person is cordial or even friendly, always keep a formal tone. Exclamation marks, smileys, SMS abbreviations and other typographical fantasies should be handled sparingly.

Likewise, the use of acronyms and technical abbreviations must be adapted to the interlocutor. We must not underestimate the language barrier that may exist between employees depending on the positions held and the generations.

Rigidity:

Conversely, one should not fall into the excess of rigidity by adopting a cold and clinical tone. Your email must reflect your personality, even your enthusiasm if the subject lends itself to it.

Interviewed by Business Insider magazine, Vicky Oliver, author of several books on communication practices in the workplace, laments these one-line emails which are so informal they seem to be written by automatons.

Reply to all:

When replying to a collective email, make sure you are sending your email to. If you want to contact the whole group included in the first email, you can reply to all.

However, be sure to respond only to the author of the email if your return does not concern all of the recipients. At best, your answer does not interest anyone, at worst it concerns one of the contributors on the mailing list.

Include a recipient in CC without their approval:

Sharing information, when it is not your responsibility, can be a source of trouble. You may even be held responsible. In an electronic exchange, when responding, it is never a good idea to include a carbon copy (CC) person if the author of the email has not requested anything.

Indeed, including a client or employee in CC when your boss or another person in the company has made personal or confidential comments, can have serious consequences. If you hesitate to invite a new interlocutor in your exchanges, it is better never to presume the intentions of the people already present in the distribution list. You will avoid many mistakes.

Include a recipient in CCI:

Adding a recipient in CCI means including it invisibly in the exchange. His email address will not appear on the mailing list. This practice should be handled with care. While it keeps data confidential, in this case the contact of the person in CCI, it can also be misinterpreted. Still according to Vicky Oliver, resorting to the ICC translates mistrust and secrecy, for some.

“If you need to email someone who technically shouldn’t be on the channel, copy and paste the email into a separate email for that person.

Take care of the subject of your email:

It’s me, Hi, Hello. Avoid these labels which provide no information on the content of your email. Without a clearly identified message, there is little chance that employees will open your email, at the risk of even putting it directly in the trash.

Because, contrary to what one might think, these interjections do not attract the attention of your recipients. The golden rule to follow is that of a concise and informative subject, making it possible to understand in two or three words the interest of the email.

Personal and / or humorous emails:

If the collaborators get along well and the relations are friendly, sometimes it happens to send a photo, a funny story, a quote, etc. And it is not prohibited, on the contrary. However, be careful not to abuse these secondary emails.

By flooding your employees’ professional inbox with these messages, it can quickly become tedious for them, at the risk of one day deleting a really important email.

Be steep:

At times it can be tempting to resort to a tone of bitterness and hostility, especially when deadlines have not been met or the content is not to your satisfaction. Avoid this pitfall at all costs. The interlocutors always remember the exchanges, especially when they are virulent.

Such a reaction on your part could therefore harm negotiations and long-term relationships with employees. Rather than reacting with anger and annoyance, compose the email you want to send, save it in drafts, and come back to the content after 48 hours. Taking a step back will help to qualify your remarks and achieve your goals faster.

Being too friendly:

When you know the recipient well, you tend to drop the usual formulas to resort to subtleties, innuendos, even private jokes. However, it is good to remember that the recipient is a work colleague or a client and that, in this context, you must respect certain courtesies: please / please, Thanking you / you to conclude with Bien à vous / toi, for example. In a professional email, you will never err on the side of courtesy.

A ridiculous email address:

If you send an email in a professional capacity, whether to a client, colleague or potential employer, avoid sending it from a personal email account. Not only is it better to keep your personal email address for the inner circle, but it may also be that this address is a bit ridiculous, inappropriate, even vulgar.

The institutional nature of the exchange would then be impacted and your image discredited.

An email full of mistakes:

Sometimes a typo and a typo can slip into an email. We won’t hold it against you. But sentences with haphazard syntax and random grammar are not acceptable.

Whether you’re writing in a hurry or not, take the time to systematically proofread the content before sending. If you have any doubts, write your email with word processing software to benefit from the spell checker. You can copy and paste the email, once the content has been validated. Last point: “Sent from my iPhone” is no excuse to botch an email.

Sending emails at 3 am:

Some are insomniacs, others are more productive at night. Whatever your pace of work, beware of the schedules for sending your emails. Employees are often attentive to this detail and draw conclusions that may be wrong.

At best, they think you are a workaholic with no privacy. At worst, they will think you are obsessive and monomaniac. Save your nightly emails in drafts to send them at a convenient time.

Loud punctuation:

The exclamation mark is bar dynamite! Used indiscriminately, its sole function is to transmit the speaker’s excitement.

In other words, do not get carried away with frantic use of this punctuation, at the risk of appearing immature.

Inappropriate font:

Choose a classic font (Arial, Calibri, Times New Roman), a reasonable font size (10 or 12 points) and a neutral color (black or dark blue). The sobriety of the font will allow fluid and efficient reading.

Being too expansive: 

As a general rule, a recipient goes through his emails diagonally to identify the 2 or 3 essential information before opening the next one. Write your emails accordingly, structuring your message in short paragraphs that will capture your key points.

Bulleted lists and numbered lists can be a good option. You can also italicize, bold or underline important information, without overdoing it, at the risk of having the opposite effect. Large blocks of text are prohibitive.

Source: Regionjob