Email Etiquette How to Ask People for Things and Actually Get a Response - Jocelyn Glei

This resource first appeared in issue #29 on 19 Jun 2020 and has tags Managing Your Career: Other, Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools, Strategy: Working with Decision Makers

Email Etiquette: How to Ask People for Things and Actually Get a Response - Jocelyn Glei

As you move up in research computing (or anywhere really) you start communicating more, especially upwards, with people whose attention is torn between more and more things. That means for your emails to work you have to make them increasingly self-contained but also concise. There’s 9 points here but four of them are key tools in my kit:

• Lead with the ask - You’re sending this email to achieve some purpose: either to get a go-ahead for something, inform someone, ask for a decision, etc. Lead with that.

• Write your subject lines like headlines - They should have a pretty good idea of the purpose of the email and what is asked of them by reading the scanning

• Give them a deadline - This, plus a default, is a secret weapon of mine. “Let me know by Tuesday, and if I haven’t heard otherwise I’ll assume it’s ok to submit the abstract”. It might take you some getting used to doing this, but honestly, give it a try. For high stakes/high time sensitivity things you wouldn’t be using email anyway. Give them a deadline and a default action you’ll take!

• Preview all messages on your phone - Another secret weapon. There’s a 33% chance your boss is reading this email on a phone in a meeting. You want it to be clear in that context.