Secrets to Powerful E-Mail

 

How to Tap E-Mail’s Maximum Potential and Steer Clear of its Lethal Traps

World Bank Features Whelan Group’s E-mail Seminar

“1 Hour, 47 Minutes: Time the average respondent spent using  e-mail each day—about 25% of the work day.”

Source: Washington Post report on survey of more than 1,100 U.S. businesses by the ePolicy Institute, American Management Association and Clearswift

Are You Using E-Mail Smartly?

Amazing! Even though e-mail use now eats up, on national average, 25% of the work day—and work week—there’s been virtually no investment in training people to use this new medium smartly. No coaching on capturing, to the full, e-mail’s huge communications potential and avoiding its hidden and dangerous traps.

Secrets to Powerful E-mail fills this learning gap. It takes participants through a fresh, comprehensive, and highly productive look at their own e-mail practice. The workshop also includes a nifty take-away card distilling the key learning points for easy reference.

Why Your Organization Needs This Program

The Problem

E-mail is “better, faster, cheaper.” So what’s the problem?

With its speed, ease of use and virtually unlimited reach, e-mail is edging out conventional on-paper and phone communications — and bypassing face-to-face meetings. The result: a radical change in the culture of communication in the workplace. But along with it comes:

• High tech. Low touch.
• Bluntness in tone
• Higher volume. Lower quality
• Miscommunications
• Flooded inboxes
• In-house e-mail battles among co-workers
• Sloppy, on-the-fly writing
• Offended clients and stakeholders
• Legal exposures
• Damage to corporate image
• Impulse-driven messages, sent out without the cautionary second look that used to go into every paper letter and memo

All because e-mail is a complex, speed-driven medium that lures users to write quickly, informally and carelessly.  It creates the feel of impermanent phone or face-to-face talk. But it delivers its message permanently and impersonally in text.

In short, it’s a hybrid that creates contradictory expectations on both the sender’s side and the reader’s side.

The Solution

Secrets to Powerful E-Mail

This seminar is the latest in a menu of Whelan Group workshops that have consistently earned high praise for more than a decade in both the U.S. and internationally.

It provides e-mail users with a structured forum to develop a sophisticated understanding of the complex nature of this powerful new medium—and share experiences about a medium typically used in isolation. It even addresses when NOT to use e-mail.

What Participants Will Learn

The workshop focuses on five key dimensions at play in almost every e-mail interaction. It shows practical, hands-on ways to:

• Master each dimension for more powerful, effective communication, and
• Steer clear of the traps inside each.

The Five Dimensions:

1. The Inbox: Learn how to arrive in your receiver’s in-boxes with reader-friendly subject lines and openings that grab attention.

2. On-Screen Writing: Deal with the special challenges of communicating effectively on the e-mail screen—which calls for new writing strategies, quite different from conventional on-paper communications.

3. Person-To-Person: Learn how to cope with the uniquely interpersonal character of e-mail—where the right tone builds good business relationships, but careless or insensitive word choice can backfire in damaging miscommunications. Valuable tips also on sensitivity in using e-mail’s in multicultural environments.

4. Public Exposure: Security/Privacy/Legal Exposure—Develop a savvy awareness of how e-mail’s seductively “private” character can lure even seasoned users to send impulsive, ill-thought messages that cause serious legal or reputation problems.

5. Relentless Volume: Choose from a host of best-practice tips to save time and cope effectively with the flood of e-mails that crowd in-boxes, calling out for rapid replies or getting lost amid in-box clutter.

Available in Two Presentation Options

Standard Half-Day Format

Covers all five dimensions plus hands-on e-mail editing exercises. Includes laminated take-away tips card distilling core e-mail “secrets” to apply in each dimension.

Abridged “Brown-Bag” Format

Designed for a lunchtime offering or for an engaging session in a departmental retreat.

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