Flaming me, flaming you: 7 ways to avoid email misunderstandings
07 July 2014
image: awsum-wallpapers
In this post, I offered ten top tips for writing emails. And in this one, I put email into a broader context. Now I want to look at why email is so easily misuderstood, and how we might put things right.
Studies have shown that we're likely to misinterpret almost half the emails we receive. According to Management Today, email provider GMX has found that 30% of us are regularly, and unintentionally, offended by emails at work.
One reason is the sheer volume of email we have to deal with. More than a quarter of your day at work is likely to be spent reading and answering emails, according to another new survey. (For more details, check out this infographic, brilliantly composed by Bob Al-Greene.)
The speed of email also creates problems. Because it travels fast, we feel compelled to read it – and reply - quickly. According to GMX, 70% of us now get irritated waiting for a reply to our emails; and 25% of us are determined to answer emails more quickly. And new technologies are adding to the problem: 27% of all emails are now opened on mobile devices, contributing still further to attention deficit and knee-jerk reactions.
But the most important source of email misunderstanding is our expectation of the medium.
We want email to be conversation; but it isn’t. "A typical e-mail has this feature of seeming like face-to-face communication," says Professor Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago. "It's informal and it's rapid, so you assume you're getting the same paralinguistic cues you get from spoken communication."
Real conversation is full of paralinguistic information: the meaning that we glean from visual and vocal cues, beyond the actual words spoken. We interpret what someone says from their voice: from tone, volume and pacing. We observe their facial expressions and their body language, and judge whether they sync with the spoken words.
Email just can’t compete.
Epley recently ran a study focussing on how well electronic messages conveyed sarcasm. He concluded that writers overestimate their ability to communicate emotion and readers overestimate their ability to decode them. It’s a recipe for mutual misunderstanding.
In part, this overconfidence grows out of egocentrism: as writers, we assume that others experience stimuli in the same way that we do. But there’s a subtler and more dangerous problem. When a message lacks context and we lack rapport with the sender – which is all too often the case with email – we tend to respond defensively. In evolutionary terms, it’s safer to assume hostility until proven otherwise. And we all know that attack is the best form of defence.
Of course, rapport reduces the risk of flaming. Emailers who know each other well are likely to have fewer online misunderstandings. That’s because rapport builds up what Professor Michael Morris of Columbia University calls “a buffer of positive regard”: a kind of credit account of mutual respect that we can draw on when hit by the shocks of unintended offence.
But rapport doesn’t easily arise from emailing each other. It is, in Morris’s words, “an interpersonal resonance of emotional expression, involving synchronous gesture, laughing, and smiling together.”
If you want to add credit to your interpersonal accounts, there’s really only one option: talk to people.
Meanwhile, how to improve matters in the inbox? Maybe we should start by acknowledging that email misunderstanding, like Donald Rumsfeld’s stuff, happens. All we can really do is reduce the chances of it occurring.
Here are seven steps that might help.
1. Think about your reader.
This applies to both writing and reading. What do you know about the other person? How would you speak with them face to face, or on the phone?
If you’re reading, give the writer the benefit of the doubt. They may be having a bad day; they may be nervous. They may not be using their first language. Check your response for hidden assumptions. Above all: pause before responding. Separate the information from the feelings. What do you need to know from this email? What do you need to do?
If you’re writing, it helps to read what you’ve written aloud. Would you actually say these words to this person? Better still: ask a trusted colleague to read out your email and listen hard. One useful tactic is to read your text in the opposite way to what you intend – whether serious or sarcastic. It makes sense either way? Revise immediately.
2. Use email etiquette.
Trying to be pleasant might actually be counterproductive. Kristin Byron of Syracuse University suggests in a fascinating study that we’re likely to read emotional content in email more negatively than the writer intended. We tend to interpret positive email messages as neutral, and neutral ones as hostile. That’s why we often read bald, apparently emotionless messages as rude.
The nicer you try to be in email, it seems, the more your reader is likely to take it the wrong way.
Smilies may not help. Byron suggests that emoticons may act as symbols, rather than expressions, of emotion; we may read them as less authentic than other emotional cues, such as response time, message length, or the writer’s level of formality.
In other words, good manners matter as much in email as in any other form of communication. Email has inherited some of the etiquette of letter-writing: the salutation (‘Dear reader’) and the complementary close (‘Yours sincerely’). Both have morphed into innumerable email variations; but, in whatever form, they remain useful as etiquette tags. A Financial Times survey a few years ago found that 60% of readers objected to the lack of salutations in email.
And don’t be afraid to use what I call 'handshakes': those little relationship-builders with which we top and tail our emails. “I hope you are well”, or “I hope you enjoyed your holiday” can work wonders for rapport. It does pay to avoid clichés: there’s probably not much life left in: “If you have any questions, please do not hesitate...” And we should keep our handshakes simple. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention” will probably read as more authentic (and less sarcastic) than “I can’t tell you how grateful I am for all the trouble you took in unearthing this heap of management garbage yesterday”.
3. Create context.
According to psychologists Massimo Bertacco and Antonella Deponte, composing email at speed affects our episodic memory – our ability to recall events. As a result, we often leave out the contextual information that will help our readers relate to what we're saying.
Compare letter-writing. (Remember letters?) Because they take time to arrive, we feel we have time to write them. And that means we tend to ground our words in memories we share with our reader. Those stark, one-line emails, in contrast, lack any sense of history.
The answer: include framing information in your emails. This may feel like waffling; but it might be worth spending a line or two setting the scene, or referring to some experience you have recently shared. Your reader is more likely to understand both the significance of your message and the emotional tone with which you’re delivering it.
This does not mean reliving past history in every email, as you will see from my next point, which is –
4. Avoid the past tense.
We use three tenses: past, present and future. We need to use them carefully, because each carries hidden meanings.
- We associate the past tense, unconsciously, with blame or self-justification. That’s because it deals in matters of justice. Did this happen? Should it have happened? Who was responsible? Who should be punished?
- The present tense deals in values. It implicitly tells the reader what kind of person you are, what values you hold, what tribe you belong to.
- The future tense is about choice. It suggests decision-making. The future tense leaps past blame and values, and seeks to do the right thing.
The tense to avoid, if possible, is the past. It can generate tit-for-tat recriminations; it can create blame; and it gets us nowhere.
Focus on the present tense to bond, and on the future tense to create solutions.
(Thanks to Jay Heinrichs for pointing out this powerful idea to me.)
5. Don’t just mirror; align.
Mirroring, says Nick Morgan in his new book, Power Cues, builds agreement. And normally, that’s true. We tend to agree with people we think are like us. Write like your reader – subtly echo their words and expressions – and they will probably feel well disposed towards you.
But if you’ve hit a serious misunderstanding, mirroring could be disastrous. Better to align, suggests Morgan. “Alignment looks and feels different from mirroring. With alignment, you stand shoulder to shoulder with someone, looking in the same direction.”
Don’t mirror the language; find the common cause.
Which leads me to –
6. Be collaborative, not confrontational.
Your emotions may be telling you to confront. And social media give us the illusion that we can get away with aggression. (Hence the increasing fashion for Twitter abuse and trolling.) But the consequences can come back and bite. Be under no illusions: collaboration beats confrontation every time.
Stop. Think. Act.
Cut down on ‘you’ and ‘I’: talk about ‘we’ and ‘us’. Go back to the objectives of the conversation: what are you both working to achieve? Give praise. Give way a bit. Ask questions. Suggest plans.
7. Explain your feelings rather than expressing them.
If you feel you must tell the reader how you feel, then do just that. Explain how you feel.
Use phrases like “this situation makes me feel...” or “actually, right now, I feel... about this.” Your reader will then know what they’re dealing with, rather than having to guess at a subtext. Try to explain these feelings calmly, as if they belong to someone else; explain why they matter; and suggest how to move on.
If you feel you need to refer to the other person’s feelings, don’t assume that you know what they are. Say: “I have the impression that perhaps you’re feeling...” They can then confirm, deny or qualify. They stay in charge of their own emotional disclosure, and they retain their self-respect.
It’s easy to blame others for misunderstandings. It’s also very understandable. Blame is a default position in the way we humans make sense of problems. We shout at the other driver; we hit the crashed computer; and we kick back against emails that we misread.
What’s not quite so easy is to accept that we might – actually, must – have contributed to a misunderstanding. If we think about how we helped an email exchange go wrong, we can learn how to put it right. And that has to be good for all of us.
Read more:
I run courses on email writing. Take a look at a typical course outline.
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