How to coach your team to write more effective emails

If your workers send emails as part of their job, coaching them on writing emails more effectively is a low-hanging fruit, and failing to do so is a massive missed opportunity. Yet, almost no one does.

The impact of better email writing

If your team is excessively polite and formal in their internal emails, wasting twenty seconds to add a few unnecessary lines, and they send twenty emails a day, addressing this would save three workdays a year. (20 emails a day times 20 seconds equals 6.67 minutes a day, multiplied by 220 working days equals 24.45 hours, which is about three 8-hour working days).

If your team sends external emails, how much would a 10% higher closing rate mean to you?

If your team’s poor communication causes unnecessary back-and-forths, how much would cutting these by 10% mean to you?

Coaching your team to write better emails is a high-leverage activity and should be high on your to-do list.

Refute the pervasive assumption that people know how to write emails. Most people have never been trained and would benefit from some coaching.

Let’s see how you can do it, and let’s begin with what you shouldn’t do.

What not to do

• Don’t enroll your people in a course on writing better emails. Most of the advice contained there would be too generic for the specific emails your team sends.

• Don’t ask HR to train your people, for the same reason as above, with the exception of an HR person who knows extremely well the context your team works in (it’s rarer than commonly believed).

• Don’t hire an external coach, again, unless they specialize in your specific industry and have extensive knowledge of the kind of work your team does.

• Don’t run a one-way training, where you speak and your team listens. You might give your people the perfect checklist to follow (assuming it exists), yet they might not follow it or follow it sub-optimally.

Don’t make it formal. Depending on the context and personalities involved, announcing a formal session might produce feelings of inadequacy, skepticism, annoyance, anxiety, or other negative emotions.

Instead, here is what to do.

Coach your people

Here is how I used to coach my people to write better emails.

First, I would observe. I wouldn’t proactively take action but wait for an email with ample margins of improvement to enter my inbox.

Then, during my next one-on-one with one of the people on my team, I would mention the email, saying I noticed it could have been written, e.g., more clearly.