Your Top 10 Email Frustrations – Survey Results
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The ease of email communication does not necessarily make it easy to communicate. It can be difficult to navigate through the barrage of emails filling our inboxes sapping our time, energy and attention. You voiced your frustrations loud and clear.
Thank you for the tremendous response, for sharing your thoughts and experiences. Special appreciation to all the great folks on Twitter responding with their usual insight and humor.
Here are “Your Top 10″ frustrations with the business email you receive:
1. What’s the point? This is the biggest frustration for all of us. We read the first two sentences of an email and have no clue why the person sent it. Scanning (that’s how we read the torrent of emails we receive) the rest of the message, we still can’t find the reason we received it.
If it is not from someone we know, we quickly hit the delete button. If it is from a known source or possibly important, we shovel our way through the mud trying to find the sender’s intent. Not only have we used valuable time to dig through the muck, our opinion of the writer went down a notch or two.
2. Subject line is blank, useless or off-topic. A close second for the biggest email frustration is useless subject lines. The subject line is supposed to be a preview of what’s to follow. It’s the only part of the message the sender can be reasonably certain we will read.
So why do they squander it with meaningless headlines like; Hi, FYI, Good Morning, Tues. or leave it blank? I presume there was a purpose for sending me the email (at least in their minds), so why not tell me the main point up front? If you get my attention with a good subject line, I am more likely to read the rest of the email a bit more carefully. How difficult is it to change the subject line when the topic has changed?
Last week I opened an email labeled “Project Update”, and it was a request for information on a completely unrelated topic. The sender is requesting action or information so wouldn’t they want to highlight it?
3. Wordiness. Bureaucratic jargon, worn-out clichés and other useless phrases contaminate even the best email message. Despite my best efforts, I know some of these tired expressions slip into mine. We would rather the writer got to the point quickly. Why don’t they?
Many business people feel they have to dress their message in an Armani suit or trot out the $100 words to appear knowledgeable and demonstrate their expertise. Give us a short and clear message and we’ll declare you a genius.
4. Punctuation and Grammar Errors: We all make mistakes, and understand that others do too. But when an email is filled with grammar and punctuation errors, we focus on these and not the message. One of the most abused letters in the alphabet is “i”.
It is not hard to capitalize a letter, and since they are referring to themselves, aren’t they worth the effort?
I am not a grammar guru by anyone’s standards, but do try to use the basic skills. The choice to ignore basic eight-grade level English skills makes us feel unimportant, not worth the time and effort of fundamental writing skills.
5. Why didn’t they read the first one? You provided all the necessary information in the first email, and now they are asking for it again. Smoke billows from your ears as you find a nice way to tell them that you already sent everything they are asking for. I usually forward the original email with a quick note suggesting the first one might have been caught by their spam filter or lost in cyber-space.
6. Knowing when to hold ‘em: You were clear that this category was separate from angry, inappropriate emails, but referring to messages updating us on projects we are no longer involved in, those forwarded in an effort to disguise tattle-telling, and criticisms disguised as helpful comments. What about the person who walks by your office 5 times a day, why did they have to send an email?
You also do not want the endless stream of joke, poems, cute pictures, and chain emails flooding into your business account, preferring to share those with family and friends through a personal account. Don’t forget the countless emails with no results. When the third email has passed through with no resolution, it is time to pick up the phone.
7. Hiding behind the email screen: You are upset with messages sent to shield the sender from speaking with you because of a difficult situation, conflict, or miscommunication issue. We know these are best handled in person, or at the very least on the phone. Email only flames the situation, and rarely results in a satisfactory solution. I understand that they don’t want to personally deal with unpleasant circumstances, but it can make a bad situation worse, damaging future associations.
8. Forwarding without editing first: We are all tired of messages forwarded complete with the entire thread still in tact and displaying every recipient’s email address. Wouldn’t it be nice if the sender edited out unnecessary information and summarized the important points? Telling us why they are sending helps soothe our impatience. Senders take a risk when forwarding long threads. First, the odds of us reading beyond the first two sentences in the message are slim. Second, there may be information the original sender did not want others to see. Sometimes we forget that any email we send can be forwarded to anyone. By some magic, people find the one piece of information we did not want broadcasted and make sure everyone sees it.
9. Abrupt or rude: Chances are the sender did not mean to appear harsh. They forgot how important tone is when writing. Without the benefit of facial expressions and gestures to convey their attitude, we can only interpret their words. If they had used full sentences, chosen better words, or taken a moment to read the message before sending it, I like to think they would have rewritten it.
10. Reply to all: I keep thinking I can remove this reminder from my better business writing workshops, but inevitably, a participant brings it up and others quickly chime in with their own tales of annoyance. It is kind of someone to thank the person who provided extra assistance, but did all 233 of our inboxes need to be clogged with a message for one person?
We think it is simple common sense, but it remains one of the top ten frustrations.
Did your biggest frustrations make the top 10? Is the survey missing something you find exasperating in the business emails you receive. Please leave a comment for a follow-up article.
Write Well – Right Results
Jane Dominguez, CPA
The Write Business Advantage
On-site Workshops for Better Business Writing Today
(520) 668-0327
jane@writebusinessadvantage.com
http://www.writebusinessadvantage.com
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/WriteAdvantage.
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