Does the email you write really work?

E-mail is the most common form of communication between entrepreneurial teams and Internet companies today. But what is the communication effect? What are the taboos and techniques that you really understand? How to communicate effectively, how to make sure your communication is up to expectations by sending effective emails?

To communicate effectively, let's take a look at what is communication and what is its basic model?

The definition of "communication": the process of conveying and feedback the thoughts and feelings between people, between people and groups, in order to achieve consensus and smooth feelings.

As shown in the figure, the sender communicates the message to the receiver by encoding, which is decoded and understood in the middle through the noise, and then the receiver passes the feedback through the noise to the original sender for decoding.

The first half of it looks much like the way television works, TV stations send coded signals, television antennas receive signals, and eventually display images on TV by stripping the signal from the noise and decoding the amplifier. And we never say that you communicate with TV because it lacks the necessary process in the second half, which is to acknowledge receipt of the information.

Email is not communication, unless the other party has a reply, otherwise it is only "edm".

Sending mail at work always defaults to being able to receive and understand our emails in a timely manner, and that's often not the case.

Effective response to communication noise-distance

The best message is not to email, because the message stretched the distance between the communication, and distance is the most "noise" communication. Distance can be understood as physical or as a chain.

Physical distance may be really standing farther, and leading to the reality of the sound transmission error, the final communication failure. It may also be because of the flexible Office system, so that some of the original can be face-to-face communication, into the telephone or e-mail communication.

Tight-type centralised office is clearly helping to mitigate this problem. The things you write about long emails can be clearly articulated, because team members keep the information synchronized with you, and your communication only needs to be "incremental update" each time.

And when we have to send a message, we must avoid the communication chain long (long) far and lead to error. For example, someone outside the team to seek cooperation, you as the first contact person, and the other side of your email to determine the final thing, and then you will be copied to the corresponding marketing staff. And this cc, just makes the situation immediately complicated, unless you have a direct division of labor in the mail. Because you cc mail, the lower end of the message is that you communicate with each other a lot of dispersed information, redundant information exacerbated the reading of the "distance" (length), the information once again loss.

At this point, the most accurate approach is to communicate with each other after a phase, a new e-mail, take time to introduce the background and the exchange of results. CC One person at a time and introduce each other to each other, delegating this person to continue distributing tasks to the team (if any), and then always summarizing the information and communicating with external people. Let the outside staff to try to only communicate with one of our employees, if it does not matter to themselves, you can directly indicate that the following messages do not have to cc themselves. Because the external communication is different from internal communication, the other side may not understand the specific responsibilities of the staff, and many CC or CC, resulting in communication failure.

The most important task of planning communication is to identify and qualify who should communicate with whom and who will receive the information.

Understand the classification of communication methods

Because of different communication needs, we need different ways of communication.

Interactive communication: This refers to the communication between the two sides or multiple exchanges of information. The aim is to ensure that all participants have the most effective means of achieving a common understanding of a topic, including talks, teleconferencing, video conferencing, etc.

This kind of communication means that the effect is good, but in fact, the more losses. A person drives 2 hours of meeting, then loses 2 hours of capacity, if 10 people participate in this meeting, lost 20 hours of work performance. At the same time ensure that these 10 people are present or free at the same time, there may be more costs. So some sharing within the team, unless it's really worth it, is just wasting valuable time.

Push-type communication: The most commonly mentioned in peer communication [push! Push!]. is a specific recipient of information sent to understand information. This approach ensures that information is released, but the goal is to ensure that the information reaches the target audience, or that the information is understood by the target. Push-type communication includes the above mentioned emails and letters, memos, reports, faxes, QQ messages, text messages, micro-letters, press releases, etc.

As mentioned above, this means of communication is not a complete "communication" behavior. Communication is complete unless you have the exact feedback or results that you understand. But, you actually when you use push communication, you do not want to and everyone "complete this communication", for example, you send a bulletin called for an activity, only the final response to your talent is a communication, but you also do not expect everyone to reply. It can be seen that the no-fault of this communication is not "interactive communication" high, but if your partner is using "push-type communication", then you simply understand the other side of the understanding and feedback, it is a successful "interactive communication."

Pull-type communication: In the case of a large amount of information or the use of a lot of audience. It requires the receiving party to obtain the content of the information autonomously. Including enterprise intranet, electronic online courses, knowledge base and so on.

In fact, in addition to the concept of this information, the previous mentioned to the new "one-way communication" mentioned in the rules and Regulations and organization chart, business distribution and introduction of these, should be part of the pull-type communication. Be sure to ensure that your team members have a fixed place and process quickly acquired when they need to know the information. Go to don't forgive a drag-and-mail nuisance, he is wasting everyone's efficiency.

Be a mail terminator

It's time for you to go on a date, and the IPhone's 48-letter-mail team is unforgivable. The purpose of communication is to confirm that the communication is known and to take effective action rather than simply adding unread numbers to the message. In this case, you need to do a message terminator, and immediately use the following solutions.

1. A topic worthy of 48 emails to be discussed, assuming that they are valuable, and that it is clear that the meeting should be organized immediately.

2, a 48 but back and forth are the same thing in N ways, they are clearly supposed to be brainstorming phase, and they quickly reply to prove that they are basic online, you should immediately organize them into instant chat tools to continue the discussion.

3, a 48 mail exchanges, everyone is in the "contribution" of a certain content, you should immediately designate a person as a "drop box", all the people directly to it delivery, and by his unified summary collation.

4, a 48-mail exchange, we are all around a topic, the most important discussion is because two of them because of style, habits or concerns of different points of contention, should immediately ask them to discuss in private.

5, a 48 mail exchange, where the law is the theme-discussion-Ask the subject-then discuss. This is clearly related to all the information, because the chain of communication has become longer, and there is information loss. The correct approach should be to use pull-type communication, in a specific place to publish information, the release of information can always be "top", all the relevant people to lead to a new place, and then discussed below.

6, a 48 mail exchange, in the discussion of a deliverable of the N-type problem, immediately verify the relevant activities schedule, if possible delay must take action. And if there is still time to deliver, and now everyone is imagining the possibility, it is important to emphasize the scope of the original requirement and create a new message based on the potential for another discussion.

Of course, you don't have to actually see 48 to take action. At the same time, really useful information should be sorted and refined by you, in the "Empty your Inbox" before the Geek Park, we can see that all the information in the mail should have a place to belong: project folder, to-do list, process table, address book, browser bookmark. If it were not for these categories, it was clear that someone misplaced the information. For this, we will give you a detailed introduction in our later articles, which we shall not repeat here.