8 Email Etiquette Tips - How to Write Better Emails at Work

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0:25Jeff Su:Okay, real talk. Making email etiquette mistakes in the workplace is not gonna capsize your career, but learning the unspoken rules of writing professional emails will affect how competent you are perceived to be in the eyes of your colleagues. And since there are no standardized training courses for this, in this video, I'm gonna first share the very real benefits of getting good at emailing in the workplace. Then dive into my top eight tips for professional email etiquette, many of which I learned the hard way doing my first full-time job as a management consultant. So let's get started. Hi everyone, my name is Jeff, and I'm truly honored to be able to partner with Harvard Business Review for this video about a nerdy passion of mine, email etiquette in the workplace.

1:09Jeff Su:Think back to the last time you received a poorly written email. You might've had to reread it a few times to get the main point, and the action items might've been scattered all over the place. Worst case scenario, it led to an unnecessarily long back and forth email thread that could have been avoided had the initial email been properly planned out. And therein lies the beauty of well-crafted emails. Not only does it help you, the sender, come across as more capable by showcasing strong communication skills, but also saves the reader so much of their time by only servicing information relevant to them.

1:45Jeff Su:So without further ado, my first tip is to have a call to action when appropriate in the email subject line. Most of us are familiar with the generic action required in subject lines, right? My recommendation is just take it a step further and include exactly what you need the recipient to do and the estimated time it takes for them to do it. For example, instead of writing action required, feedback for project X, write five minute survey, feedback for project X instead. This very small tweak probably gave you a lot more context. It's a survey for project X, I can get it done very quickly in between the two meetings I have.

2:21Jeff Su:Or if it's not appropriate to include the estimated time be specific about the call to action. For example, instead of spending estimates for Q4, write Elon to approve spending estimates for Q4. So Elon knows what's expected of him even before he opens the email. Tip number two, stick with one email thread for the same topic. I'm gonna be honest, I got called out for this by a colleague of mine, but I'm glad she told me. Basically, I used to send out separate emails for the same project whenever I had a new idea or follow-up question. But if you think about it from the recipient's point of view, they're missing the context from the original email thread and multiple new emails on the same topic just clog up their inboxes unnecessarily.

3:05Jeff Su:So the general rule of thumb here is to stick to the original email chain for any given topic so everyone can refer to the same information. Email etiquette tip number three, explain why you added in or took out recipients in email threads. There are many situations where I have to add someone in to the email thread to get their input or take someone out to spare their inbox. A professional and easy way to do this is to add a sentence at the very top of the email, clearly showing who you added in or took out. I like to add parentheses and italicize the font to separate it from the actual email body.

3:38Jeff Su:This way the readers know who the new recipients are immediately. Tip number four actually addresses a very big pet peeve of mine, which is when senders include a lot of information upfront, but what they're really trying to get at or ask for is at the very end of the email. To avoid that, always include your main point first, followed by the context. Just compare these two emails. Hi, Jane, my name is Jeff and I'm in the product marketing team. We're preparing a forecast deck for the big boss and he's looking for the revenue projection numbers for the secret electric car that's launching soon.

4:10Jeff Su:Can I trouble you to pull that data for me? Compare that with, Hi, Jane, may I please trouble you for the electric car revenue projection numbers? Context. The product marketing team is currently preparing a forecast deck for the big boss, and we're hoping to use the projections to fight for more budget. It would be amazing to get numbers for 2025 to 2030 in a Google Sheets format. By pushing the context back, we're giving the other person the option to read the not so important part of the email. Oftentimes when we're emailing someone more senior than us, we feel obligated to explain why we're emailing right at the beginning so it doesn't seem like we're bothering them.

4:46Jeff Su:This is actually counterproductive because if the person is very senior, they probably just wanna know what you're emailing them about, how they can help deal with it, then move on with their own schedules. Tip number five, if you receive an email with a lot of disorganized content, summarize the sender's main points for them in your reply. So if you receive an email from someone who clearly has not watched this video and sent you a long, wordy, convoluted message you had to reread a few times, you wanna do two things. Number one, send them this video. Number two, take a few minutes. Identify and bucket common themes from their email and summarize their message in a few sentences before responding to whatever they're emailing you about.

5:27Jeff Su:Not only does this help you confirm your understanding is correct, the other party will appreciate the extra effort you took to help them organize their thoughts. Email etiquette tip number six, hyperlink whatever possible. This is another pet peeve of mine. If you're sharing a link with someone over email, you really should take the extra few seconds to hit Command K on Mac or Control K on Windows and hyperlink the external website or video. Not only does this look so much cleaner to the recipient than just pasting the big clunky link, but it also decreases the chances of you making a mistake by adding an extra letter or deleting one in the original URL.

6:04Jeff Su:Tip number seven, change default setting to reply instead of reply all. This is honestly the risk averse side of me talking. The way I think about it, Let's say you reply to an email in a rush and you do make a mistake. The damage is contained to that one recipient because your default setting is reply to one person instead of reply to all. This is a standard setting in most, if not all of the popular email clients. And you can usually find this in the general settings section. And email etiquette tip number eight, change undo send option to 30 seconds. So you might not know this, but Murphy's law when it comes to emailing the workplace is that you will always catch your mistakes 10 seconds after the email is already sent.

6:44Jeff Su:All jokes aside, I'm sure we've all been there. We send an email, we go into the sent email folder to read it from the other person's perspective, and we realize something is wrong. Again, this is a standard setting you can play around with in all of the email apps. Instead of the default five seconds undo send, for example, we can change it to 30 seconds for good measure. Please let me and the HBR team know down the comments below which one of these tips was your favorite, or perhaps which ones you've already been using all this time. If you'd like to subscribe to my YouTube channel where I make content on how to increase productivity at work, feel free to click right here or search for Jeff Su.

7:19Jeff Su:See you on the next video. And in the meantime, have a great one.