Each e-mail affects your personal reputation

Your success with e-mail is a result of your personal reputation.

How much attention does your messages receive?

How many of them are opened and read?...

And from messages read, how many of them are misunderstood or need a phone call to be explained?

How many of the answers you suppose to get you really get?

All these evidences of your effectiveness with your electronic mails are subject to your personal reputation.

Personal reputation depends on trust and credibility that we have planted in our addressee. So, reputation is a personal capital and competitive advantage.

If you want to be more efficient with your e-mails you should cultivate and protect your reputation as a sender.

Your reputation is the sum of your "hows". In your e-mail at the workplace, reputation is build it on your frequency, style, structure, grammar ... And on the use of best practices in written communication.

E-mail reputaion leads: Arrives to the inbox before your messages, and remains there after your messages are deleted, either enhanced or decreased.

Your reputation records your past, but also creates expectations for the future.

So, after sending an email, what happens to it depends on the image before they grow.

Communication and attention are the essential components of relationships

We feel we are truly communicating with someone when we get their best attention and they listen to us. But when we feel we are not being paid attention, we feel ignored.

So, when we communicate, what matters is what we make our interlocutors feel with the way we communicate, which explains that people can more easily forget what we say or give to them, but not what we make them feel.

The way to give a correct message can have counterproductive effects, particularly if it is in writing, so many of the unproductive e-mail discussions that take place in companies could be avoided.

People are willing to accept many of the issues they receive in writing if they were delivered orally.

Of course, I imagine that right now you are thinking that those e-mail discussions are justified because they also cover the company’s need to leave a written record of what is said, and you are right, because many times it is essential to document communication processes.


However, e-mail communication in companies would be more efficient if work teams emphasized documenting the agreements and learning experiences that were obtained more quickly through telephone or face-to-face conversations.

In order to have productive and efficient written discussions or clarifications, people must have better writing skills to compensate the non-verbal clues that we normally use in face-to-face or telephone communication.

Our sensitivity towards written words...

Don't underestimate impact of what you write

We are the owners of what we keep to ourselves and the slaves of what we say. But with e-mail at the workplace: We are the owners of what we say orally and slaves of what we write.

Oral messages can make us feel bad momentarily, they are forgotten more easily than written messages. Nevertheless, written words remain as if carved in stone. They fire up our feelings more strongly than oral messages. Also, we relive those feelings every time we read them. They are files that remember what was done to us and what that made us feel.



This allows us to understand why most work discussions via e-mail can be so unproductive, particularly if we want to convey emotions and messages that are difficult to communicate, even orally.

If we complain in writing to a workmate, it is very likely that the relationship will suffer. Recipients tend to interpret the feelings they read and speculate about more strongly, thus making them perceive as a scream what would have been a perfectly tolerable observation.

When I ask what bothers people more of a work-related reprimand via e-mail, they always answer: "That it was in writing. Why didn’t she come to my post, or why didn’t he call to talk about it? Don’t they trust me or aren’t I worth a more direct communication?"

Communication is the main tool to build trust among work teams, but it can also destroy it. It is very difficult for people to flow in their team if they feel mistreated in their communications.

People will give their best effort if communication with the team is productive.

More about it...

Start managing e-mail more efficiently

Every day we get more e-mail than the day before: more urgent bussines communications, and more spam (external and internal). So, e-mail can easily eat up your whole day if you let it.

Here are some tips for managing your e-mail more efficiently:

1. Too much spam at workplace? Check with your IT department. They should be running software that removes most of these annoying messages before you see them. Not having to delete these e-mails or decide whether it’s safe to open them can be a huge time saver.

2. If you don’t need it, don’t keep it! Mailbox inflation is a real problem. If you don’t need a message, read it and delete it. The same holds true for replies. You should regularly go through your sent mail folder and delete what you don’t need.

3. E-mail systems are clogged with endless duplication of documents, particularly e-mail chains that get longer and longer with every version.

4. A lot of e-mails should never be sent in the first place. E-mail is not a particularly secure way of communicating. Sending sensitive information always is risky.

For some subjects, a phone call might be better; for others, a face-to-face talk might be the best solution.

Right messages is not enough for email productivity

Why some written messages sent to clients, providers or work mates always required verbal explanations or clarifications, although the e-mail contained all the information and was well written?

Why some e-mail "discussions" weren't completely satisfactory until there was a face-to-face conversation between those involved.

In 2004 I started to perceive the negative effects of e-mail, while providing consulting services to a technological corporation on the quality of their customer services.

Although the employees were specialized engineers with excellent education and were highly skilled in technology, they had difficulties writing e-mails to clients that didn’t require telephone or personal "clarifications".

In some complex cases of services provided to clients, the company’s credibility and trust was satisfied only after verbal communication, and not with a written message.

People may have a good technical education, but they have a hard time realizing that in some cases e-mail is not the best communication media to get credibility and trust.

For them, it was the most comfortable medium, but it wasn’t the most efficient one for their clients.

They liked the benefit that they could write messages whenever they had the time, and not immediately, and that they didn’t have to listen or see the client in a difficult service situation. But they knew -paradoxically- that sooner or later, they would have to confront the client.

Always keep in mind that e-mail may not be the appropriate channel to communicate with clients in some situations. Particularly, the situations that involve strong emotions, and any degree of conflict