Today’s workplace environment is a global environment. The entire office body setup is spread in different locations, countries or continents. Not only do the teams, customers and managers operate from different office locations; business is also expected to operate 24x7. To maintain such standards people working in shifts and over weekends has become routine. At times you could have teams with members operating out of different location. And often when there is a shift change it requires issues to be communicated from one shift member to another to maintain business continuity. In such a scenario communication plays an extremely important role in the day to day functions of a business and written communication even more so.

It is of course easiest when the entire team sits in one place, with similar working hours and has to communicate just with each other. It’s an entirely different ballgame when half the team sits in the some other part of the world, in a different time zone. Such situations offer very little opportunity for verbal communications.

There could also be a situation where you need to send an update to your manager, team and customer all at the same time. Unless you’re on a conference call with all of them, (an extremely unlikely situation), there is a very good chance that you will be sending out the update via email. With the trend in outsourcing work on a continuous upswing, there are times where you may have exchanged a billion emails with someone over the years, but have never met them or even spoken with them. Needless to say, emails have become the norm.

That said, it is therefore, apparent that a well written email is not only an effective means to operate, but in fact at times, it is the only means to project your personality, to make an impression and to convince the other person that you are the right person to work with.

Never write an email like you’re trying to think things over while writing them. Make sure you know what you want to communicate before you start writing the email. The ideas that you are trying to project should be clear.

Running a simple spell check on the email is not enough. You need to make sure that sentences are grammatically correct. In addition, an email should be well drafted with brief, to the point sentences. Very long emails tend to make the reader lose their attention midway. An email should ideally not exceed three to four paragraphs and each paragraph shouldn’t be more than ten lines.

Unlike in paper mail, you don’t need to include the postal address in an email. However, you may include your contact information if it’s in addition to your email address from where you’re sending the email.

Never write an email like you would have a conversation! A written email is more business-like and formal in nature than a conversation. Conversations even in a business meeting can run into an informal vein. However in emails it’s always better to take the formal vein.

Since it’s a business email, it’s always advisable to end the email with a formal salutation, unless you and your coworker share a cordial relationship. Some good salutations to use are “Best Regards”, “Yours Sincerely/Sincerely” or simply “Regards”.

written by Bulbul Pandya