if you're in an office job whether you're an intern or a full-time professional
one thing you can't escape from is email and as remote work is increasingly common your email
is going to be a reflection of you and if your email looks like this the recipient's impression
that you're disorganized and immature is going to be lasting what's up everyone it's kenji here
and in this video i thought i'd explain how to write professional emails at work
see while i was at university i felt like this wasn't really a topic that was covered yet when
i got to my internships or my full-time jobs it was expected of me to write in a certain way
and so to avoid making the mistakes that i did here's some tips and tricks for you
firstly does it really have to be email and if you put yourself in the shoes of
the recipient on average an office worker receives about 120 emails every workday
now that's a lot of emails especially when your job description usually doesn't entail
replying or reading emails so before you send an email think about whether it has to be an email
and the best way to know that is to see how your team communicates and copy whatever method that
they use but here's some good guidelines as well chat messaging apps like slack or teams might make
sense when you need a quick answer like a yes no or a confirmation and they should mainly be used
internally because they're hard to backtrack and search previous messages in case of disputes with
clients like i thought we occurred on this price or this was a delivery date no it wasn't so on
it's false no way not this time next up there is calling or meeting and this is best for
difficult topics that require interactions like what might be brainstorming sessions for a future
marketing campaign it's similarly useful for sensitive topics let's say you spent 10
million of the company's money to throw a massive halloween party for the interns that's probably
not something you want to tell your manager via chat message jokes aside though it's best to talk
about promotion salaries or other opportunities in person or at least via call and lastly you
have email which is best for sending detailed or important materials for example if you have
a series of questions or you want to outline the key next steps in a project now suppose
you've gone for emails and within the daily 120 emails that your manager receives he or she gets
one like this so what's wrong with it well a bunch of different things as you can see here
you've got a vague subject to the email there's an unclear call to action and a bunch of excess words
that's obviously not great so let's see how we can fix it first off in an email we got
the subject line and depending on the subject line the recipient is going to decide whether
he or she wants to read it or they just want to ignore that email according to a research report
u.s office employees average 199 unread emails and odds are some of those emails will never be
read so if you're sending something out that's urgent that needs a reply from the recipient
you don't want to fall into that group so here's how you should have a subject line if you need
the recipient to do something you can start the subject line in brackets saying action required
followed by whatever you need here the recipient is clearly going to know what needs to be done and
how long it's going to take sometimes you won't know the time frame if so you can just remove
that if it's an action that's also time sensitive here's some ways that you can get your co-workers
to do it if you know the exact date in brackets you can put something like please reply by the
actual date otherwise you can just say it's time sensitive but if it's something really pressing
you can always just put urgent as for the body of the email put whatever is most important first and
then give some context the mistake here is to do it the other way around where the recipient has
to read through every single word in the email attentively to understand whatever it is that
you're looking for instead if you put the most important thing first so whatever you're looking
for first and the context afterwards you give them the choice but not the obligation to actually have
to go through everything and here's an example where the most important thing in this case the
projected store opening cost is first and then there's an explanation as to why it's important
and why the team needs it so if the recipient knows what this email is already about he or she
can just send them the projections without having to read through the second paragraph next up we
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off using code kenji25 all right back to video and if you're adding or removing someone from
an email thread make sure you let everyone in that thread know why for two main reasons
firstly has to do with best practice just being transparent with everyone about it
and then secondly it's got to do with compliance maybe the person that you've added shouldn't be
there because of a conflict of interest but you don't know that and if you've let everyone know
at least your manager might be able to call you out on it and remove that person that's way better
than say mid project realizing that somebody that has a conflict of interest is in that thread and
he's been reading all the emails that means that the project is probably going to have to
be stocked and that's going to cost the company money and here's how you can go about it for
adding someone it can be as simple as plus build for visibility or for removing someone you can
just write minus bill for compliance and if you want to make this more noticeable you can always
italicize the sentence bolden it or highlight it depending on what your team's preferences
similarly don't get too carried away with exclamation marks or emojis that's something
that i learned myself the hard way when i did an internship one of my managers straight up asked
me to stop using so many exclamation marks so make sure you don't do that and at the top of
the emails we have the greetings and as much as you may be friends with some of your co-workers
keep in mind that emails are often forwarded so you never really know where they might end up
suppose your manager is very laid back and you send him emails starting with your bill to build
that might be fine but if that email contains some valuable information and is then forwarded to the
head of the apartment or even to the sea level executives that's obviously kind of embarrassing
if you're calling people by you so it's best to stick with a simple hi good morning good afternoon
or even there depending on how close you are with them lastly here's some safety steps that you can
take to not end up in an embarrassing situation trust me it sucks when you send out an email you
spot a mistake and there's nothing that you can do about it the first thing you can do is change the
default settings from reply all to reply on gmail for that just go to settings see more settings
and from there go to reply this way when you reply something by mistake it only goes to one person
instead of going to the full thread of maybe 20 people so one person is a lot less embarrassing
than 20 i think secondly if you're sending out an email you don't want to send it out
before you finish writing it or proofreading on gmail sending it out by mistake is as simple as
pressing ctrl enter on a windows or command enter on a mac and you're already in trouble so what you
can do instead is to write the email addresses at the bottom such that when you're done writing the
email you can copy and paste them to the top also that's going to force you to read all of the email
content down to the very bottom for proofreading in case you have any mistakes thirdly if after
doing all these things you still spot a mistake there may just be one final thing you can do
which is the undo send option and let me show you on gmail how to change it just go up to settings
see all settings and change the undo send option to max in this case that's 30 seconds
so this is what it's going to look like just a pop-up with an option to undo and sure it's not
perfect but it's still 30 seconds to save yourself from a potentially embarrassing moment and here's
some bonus tips instead of sending out a link as a whole which tends to be quite ugly to be honest
what you can do instead is use a hyperlink on gmail it's as simple as clicking on the insert
link button or if you want to use a shortcut it's just ctrl k on windows or command k on mac
another bonus is to add an automated out of the office reply just to make life easier for your
co-workers for that just go to settings see all settings and scroll to the bottom where it says
vacation responder the subject here is quite straightforward and in the email itself you
don't just want to mention when you'll be gone for but also who can be contacted instead of you
so before you press that send button do remember these tips that's all for this video
if you enjoyed it feel free to like and subscribe down below and i'll catch you in the next one