Stop Tweeting. Stop Emailing.
Giving bad news to employees over email.If anything causes me to go postal in the near future, it is going to either be Twitter or email.
Both mediums are great for communicating, if you are a already a good communicator. It is the same across mediums – know your audience, show them respect, speak clearly, and be concise. The problem with each medium is that your audience has now changed to a foreign size or composition, which is unfamiliar. That, and also that giving a computer to a normal person results in retardation.
Email should be pretty well settled by now. We’ve had it for over 20 years, most people have been using it for at least 10 years in the workplace, and any kid born after 1990 has probably had an e-mail account since they could use the Internet. Yet still we have people making unforgivable mistakes in using this familiar technology. Outlined, the ones that get me the most are:
- Giving bad news over email when more personal avenues are available. This makes you look like a coward.
- Sending grossly inappropriate things over email in the workplace. Come on, we don’t realize this is a bad idea?
- Emailing people with a single link and no explanation of why it is worth clicking on. Mark as spam -> delete.
- Sending emails without a subject. If I don’t know whether it is important or not, my default is to ignore it.
- Sending emails with a subject and no body (Subject: “We need to see you upstairs” Body: “”) This is just lazy. If you really want to one-line me, text, chat, or call me. We don’t need an archive of it.
- Being too verbose. Yes, your emails can be as long as you want them to be, but how many paragraphs do you really need to make your point? The shorter it is, the more likely I’ll be to read it.
If you are an offender of those points and can’t evolve your behavior, STOP EMAILING.
Twitter is arguably newer, but people have been working overtime to prove just how quickly they can forget the fundamentals of communication and act like complete idiots. The advantages of Twitter is that it encourages brevity, forcing people to quickly make their statements without rambling.
The disadvantage of Twitter is that people affected with IICD (Inefficient Internet Communication Disorder) fail on every other point of effective communication:
- Know your audience. Your audience isn’t composed of just the people following you. This results in tweeting about things that can later be used to blackmail the twetard into buying additional insurance or a carton of baby snakes.
- Speak clearly. If you are posting nebulous things to Twitter, are being passive-aggressive, or have some hidden agenda behind your tweets, or posting some emotional breakthrough without providing background, you suffer from IICD and are being a twetard. The basic idea is that if I can’t discern the purpose of your tweet, or can smell a hidden agenda, I’m going to light you on fire. See how clearly I communicated my last point?
- Finally, showing your audience respect. Now I’ll admit I’m guilty of this one at times in terms of outright insulting my followers, but hey – following is voluntary, there is leeway here. What is not acceptable is posting anything to Twitter (to the anonymous Internet) which should have first been communicated to an individual or group. For example, reading from your management: “Had to let an employee go today” before anyone has spoken to the actual employees is proof of extreme retardation and will again result in the tweeter being lit on fire.
If you are an offender of those points and can’t evolve your behavior, STOP TWEETING.
And people label geeks as being ineffective communicators? Hah. Geeks don’t get made fun of for being terrible at using email or Twitter.
