Friday, August 21, 2015

Follow-Up



The required procedure was clearly stated in the e-mail message but several people didn't read that far down and even some who did thought that someone else would handle it so they did nothing and others decided to do nothing anyway until someone screamed and so the assumption that notifying everyone of the procedure and the deadline didn't work and, after all, what is a deadline to some folks but a really strong suggestion, if that, and consequently what the sender regarded as a direction - an order! - was nothing more than another message and it should have been no surprise when the deadline came and went and a whopping six percent had complied and the response of the others was "Oh, yeah, I'll get on that."

2 comments:

CincyCat said...

This is the story of my life, especially when I worked as an Admin Assistant at a large corporation. Over the years, I have found that putting the deadline/call-to-action in CAPS in the first sentence (or the email subject line) works best to grab attention. Then, I have a second heading titled "REQUIREMENTS" (yes, in caps) with a simply stated list of bullets. It also never hurt to name-drop someone with an appropriately intimidating title somewhere in the email as the person who will ultimately be reviewing the information. ;-)

Michael Wade said...

CincyCat,

I like those ideas.

"Tremble and Obey" near the sign-off also helps.

Michael