The Perils of Email Communication
When I saw this blog post on Gawker.com, I just shook my head. What else can you do?
Here’s the gist: a guy who is looking for a job created a profile on Monster.com saying he’s looking for a job in the Columbus, Ohio area. He’s contacted by a recruiter looking for an employee in northern Arkansas. One snippy comment made by the job seeker (who is called “Robert” in the post) sets off a barrage of crazy emails.
Since you got my resume off of Monster, I’m sure you saw in my profile that I’m only interested in jobs in Columbus, Ohio, because you surely check these things before firing off e-mails. —Robert
I’m no geography guru, but thanks to mapquest.com, I deduced that there are about 760 miles between northwest Arkansas and Columbus, Ohio. It’s far. Twelve-plus hours in a car far. So sure, perhaps the recruiter was stretching a little bit when he contacted Robert.
And clearly, Robert was annoyed. But the entire chain of emails between these two guys are totally rude and unprofessional. Sounds like they both had a bad day.
It is so easy to misunderstand and misinterpret people when it comes to email. It happened to me just last week.
How Deadlines and Pressure Impacts Your Emails
I was on deadline and had gotten an article submission in from a media professional a week late. I worked with the art director to re-jig the publication so that we made room for this story. My first inclination as an editor is, if it’s late it doesn’t get published. But I didn’t want to ruffle any feathers, so we worked it out.
I emailed this person, whom I will call Mary for the sake of this blog post, because I was missing some pertinent information. There was a misunderstanding in what exactly I needed, so I tried to make it as clear as possible in my next email. I mentioned that I needed a very short bio of the writer, but what I got instead was a three paragraph bio that I did not have room to print. I was exasperated and annoyed.
Learn When to Reach for Your Phone
What I should have done was pick up the phone and talk to Mary directly. Even though I tried to be cordial in my emails, I was stressed out as I was up against a very tight deadline. What I did instead was continue to send emails, to which Mary responded to. I had no idea, until she called my boss, that Mary thought I was being rude.
The point is this—when emails start to bother you, it’s best to push the keyboard away and pick up the phone, especially when a business relationship is on the line.
I went back and read the email exchange, and I don’t think I was mean. Succinct, yes. But clearly Mary felt differently. Perhaps she was stressed out and having a bad day, too, which may have skewed the tone of my emails. Because of my frustration and stress in not getting what I needed from Mary, my emails were curt and to the point. Some people find this off-putting. Had I put a smiley face emoticon in my email, would it have made any difference? I have no idea.
The point is this—when emails start to bother you, it’s best to push the keyboard away and pick up the phone, especially when a business relationship is on the line. If you feel like you are misunderstanding what someone is emailing you, pick up the phone and call that person to straighten it out before you get upset or have your feelings hurt.
It’s also best to call when you feel uncomfortable leaving a paper trail of a particular conversation. My coworkers and I have had people misinterpret something we have emailed them, causing anger, frustration, and lots of wasted time worrying about something that wasn’t intended.
Some things, like laying people off or complaining about performance, is best done in person or over the phone. Technology, like email, makes communicating easier, but getting a pink slip emailed to you doesn’t make anyone feel good, and it makes the person doing the laying off appear cold and heartless.
Just because communicating virtually is easier, doesn’t mean it’s the right way to do something. If you sense that your bridge between someone is smoldering, put out the fire by picking up the phone and having an actual conversation. And don’t be afraid to apologize. Sometimes just saying, “I had no idea my words could be interpreted this way and I apologize. This is what I actually meant to convey…” can smooth out the wrinkles.
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Annoyed or not it is HUGELY unprofessional to call someone names like Joe Goddard did when calling this guy a dick. That is totally uncalled for. Added to that it very well could be that the guy who is looking for a job, is not a native English speaker and his reaction to the unwanted e-mail came accross more harshely than he intended.
So calling him a dick is wrong on all levels.
Having dealt with recruitment agencies in the past, it doesn’t surprise me how heated things got here…
I can see the problem with email miscommunication. In my former office job, my supervisor was sweet and cordial in face-to-face meetings, but her email content was opposite.
Most email communications sent to our team were interpreted as short and rude. It’s like she was two different people. I think when we hear the voice and tone inflected in our words, we can understand the nature of the situation better with less misunderstandings.
I completely agree with Melanie’s key point in this post – you must get off of the email when there is a disagreement in the substance of a situation. And particularly when dealing with your own clients.
In other words, if you and your client are arguing key points, then email is the wrong place to try to hash it out (in general.)
But IT people dealing with recruiters are a special case: recruiters earn an awful lot of money from the commodity placement of new employees, and the context of a dispute like this has to be considered.
Recruiters tend to thoughtlessly spam job board resume owners with invitations to jobs that are completely outside the job seeker’s parameters. If you indicate that you aren’t willing to relocate, most recruiters tend to then say “do you know anyone who is looking?”
From a sales perspective it’s legitimate to do this – it’s sort of the theory of cold calling.
The clash that occurs here in this story is due to most programmers sounding like they just had a stroke or other brain injury when they answer an unsolicited phone.
Programmers are the obsessive compulsive type that usually can’t tolerate intrusions. Yeah, they are terrible at PR and sales, but they have their role in society.
So the context here is that many recruiters really don’t understand how to approach programmers or other IT people, and the candidates know it and tend to react as such.
Your shared perils of email communication are very important to know for everybody. Now i will try to ignore these perils as much as possible. Thanks for sharing this informative post with us.
Thanks for a nice article with some great points. But there’s one that I have some thoughts about:
“Sometimes just saying, “I had no idea my words could be interpreted this way and I apologize. This is what I actually meant to convey…” can smooth out the wrinkles.”
I believe we should only apologise when we’ve actually made an error or we’ve done something wrong.
Personally this is how I deal with these situations:
If the other person has chosen on some level to take offence, then it’s their problem if I didn’t intend for them to take offence, and was reasonable with them. It doesn’t mean I should apologise, as that’s letting them off the hook.
If they’ve given me grief because they misinterpreted my email (which means they’ve made assumptions, and often assumptions are one of the world’s biggest f-ups) then they should apologise.
On the other hand, for instance if I was in a bad mood, and I sent an email to them that reflected my bad mood—wrong time to send it! So then the onus is on me to make amends.
I’ve personally found that because I’m confident in what I say, sometimes people can feel threatened by that, and then misinterpret my intentions, or my way of being. Like, sometimes people might misinterpret a firm and confident email from me as being rude, arrogant, insensitive, etc.
But I can’t control how people think or feel. I can only control what I think, do, feel, and say. If I’m being expected to change my tone because someone’s ego can’t handle it, then I refuse to do that because a) it’s their issue and responsibility and, b) I need to be myself, to be who I truly am instead of shoe-horning myself into someone else’s mould. I strongly believe the same is true for everyone.
Here’s a quote:
“Be yourself. If you water yourself down to please or to fit in or to not offend anyone, you lose the power, the passion, the freedom and the joy of being uniquely you. It’s much easier to love yourself when you are being yourself.” ~Dan Coppersmith
Hope that helps!
Thanks for the tip! I actually did not apologize in the example I wrote about here, because I didn’t think it was necessary. I did, however, follow up with carefully crafted email the following week telling this person that the magazine went to press and when they should be expecting their complimentary free copies. I thanked her for her participation and left it at that.
It’s true that you can’t control how people think or feel…but as a client of ours, I wanted to make sure my emails, however misconstrued, didn’t leave a sour impression.
I think the very nature of email — brief and to the point — tends to encourage people not to put the right amount of effort into the message itself. Taking time to include some pleasantries can help. Instead of saying “Come to my office” use “Could you come to my office when you get a chance to discuss… And bring… Thanks!” It takes more time, but it makes the exchange more congenial. On the other hand, I’ve noticed there are many people who also talk the same way perhaps because they don’t know any better. I don’t know how many times I’ve called someone’s office and had the phone answered by a receptionist who was clueless about how to greet people. They made the experience unpleasant from the very beginning.
We always go through a review process with emails to customers . I write it my partners edits trimming out the emotion then I do final edit
Has always worked well for us
I worked with a woman once who would start each email with “Dear Melanie” no matter how kind—or unkind—the email was. And I got a fair share of short, curt, and cutting emails from this woman.
I’m not sure if she thought putting “Dear Melanie” at the beginning of each email was going to ease me into her message or not, but it didn’t change the tone of the rest of the email one bit!
This is something new to me because as far as i see i have faced problem with email mis-communication. At that time i missed to check the email and along with it i also missed the great job opportunity. I will keep this thing in mind…..Thanks for the nice share.
I totally agree.
The biggest part of communication is not in the words, but in the tone of voice, body language, etc. You cannot communicate that on an email.
I’ve also experienced email miscommunications with people who write emails the way they talk, complete with additional vowels and odd usage of punctuation marks. In one instance (I wasn’t part of the conversation, but I was brought in as arbiter), the person in question wrote “thanks” as “thaaanks…”. When you hear her talk it’s phrased very sweetly. But when the recipient read it, it was mistakenly read as sarcasm, and things went downhill from there.
Ooooh I totally see how that “thaaaaaanks….” could be read as sarcasm—because that’s exactly how I just read it!