Civility comes from the Latin word civilis meaning citizen and can be defined as civilised conduct (especially courtesy or politeness) or a polite act or expression.
Letters, the main form of business communication before emails, are structured by convention in such a way as to encourage politeness in correspondence. You start with “Dear Sir or Madam” and conclude with “Yours sincerely” or “Yours faithfully” and most people organise their thoughts into a structure with paragraphs and sometimes numbering. Even litigation letters from the most aggressive law firms had a modicum of good manners, though you sort of got the professional message when they suggested that “with respect” you are “completely in the wrong”.
Nowadays emails, IM and texts positively encourage terseness to the point where some would say they are positively rude. The lack of structure or any formal rules or even established conventions tends to result in brevity and shorthand, which can be good but also can be seen by the recipient as aggressive or dismissive. Often in contract negotiations one side can come across as positively unpleasant and obstructive to deal with because of the nature of their online communications. In person they can then be surprisingly pleasant though some damage to the professional relationship may have been irretrievably done before you meet them.
The thing is when writing an email and even more so a text or IM getting the message across quickly tends to always trump thinking about how it may be perceived by the reader and what effect it may have on a fellow professional.
Here is a blog Ten Tips to Avoid Being Rude in Your Emails which comments In your emails, do you sound like a soulless sociopath? You’re not alone. You may be a warm and friendly person in real life, but there’s something about composing an email that makes the message sound sterile – or downright rude.And observes thatThe problem is that emails just aren’t a natural form of communication. They’re not like face to face interactions, where you rely heavily on body language to understand context.
One of the challenges is that whilst you might have received 10 or 20 letters a day as an individual in a professional practice you may well be receiving and sending 200 plus emails. As a result it is much harder to pay attention to the effect you might be making. See this Harvard Business Review article How to Make Sure Your Emails Give the Right Impression which comments Given the avalanche of email we receive each year — 121 messages per day, on average — it’s no wonder that we have become somewhat desensitized to its impact on our professional brand. We’ll spend hours polishing our LinkedIn profiles and revising our résumés, but hastily hit send on an unintelligible missive simply because we’re in a rush.
This Forbes blog from 2013 5 Ways Email Makes Your Employees Miserable comments We use email for everything related to communication and collaboration at work even though it's no longer the most effective way to do either.In my view despite some predictions of the demise of email things have not got better over the last 7 years.
There is according to this Daily Telegraph article even a tool to help you "write in a more polite, friendly tone" in your emails. There must be a problem here if someone is writing apps to solve it!
The other problem is that unlike letters which are generally sent to one person and maybe copied to a few others, email communication proliferates which means any mistake or offence caused is magnified many times over - see another Harvard Business Review Article Email Etiquette and the Perils of “Reply All”.
Nowhere are the risks of creating the wrong impression in emails more likely than in using this form of communication to manage your team. This is fraught with peril and scope for misunderstanding. See this article The Dangers of Using E-mail to Manage Employees which commences Communication is the foundation of a strong employment relationship. Ongoing, open, and effective communications with employees are fundamental ingredients for creating relationships that are based on respect. And employees who feel respected are more productive, more loyal, and have longer tenure. And then came e-mail!
I think personally that email and other forms of instant communication are great and enable different and more collaborative ways of working. However, we should consider more about how we use them and the effect they can have. As the English composer John Powell said “Communication works for those who work at it.”
And above all we should seek to be civil and polite and remember that as Theodore Roosevelt sagely observed “Politeness is a sign of dignity, not subservience.”
Letters, the main form of business communication before emails, are structured by convention in such a way as to encourage politeness in correspondence. You start with “Dear Sir or Madam” and conclude with “Yours sincerely” or “Yours faithfully” and most people organise their thoughts into a structure with paragraphs and sometimes numbering. Even litigation letters from the most aggressive law firms had a modicum of good manners, though you sort of got the professional message when they suggested that “with respect” you are “completely in the wrong”.
Nowadays emails, IM and texts positively encourage terseness to the point where some would say they are positively rude. The lack of structure or any formal rules or even established conventions tends to result in brevity and shorthand, which can be good but also can be seen by the recipient as aggressive or dismissive. Often in contract negotiations one side can come across as positively unpleasant and obstructive to deal with because of the nature of their online communications. In person they can then be surprisingly pleasant though some damage to the professional relationship may have been irretrievably done before you meet them.
The thing is when writing an email and even more so a text or IM getting the message across quickly tends to always trump thinking about how it may be perceived by the reader and what effect it may have on a fellow professional.
Here is a blog Ten Tips to Avoid Being Rude in Your Emails which comments In your emails, do you sound like a soulless sociopath? You’re not alone. You may be a warm and friendly person in real life, but there’s something about composing an email that makes the message sound sterile – or downright rude.And observes thatThe problem is that emails just aren’t a natural form of communication. They’re not like face to face interactions, where you rely heavily on body language to understand context.
One of the challenges is that whilst you might have received 10 or 20 letters a day as an individual in a professional practice you may well be receiving and sending 200 plus emails. As a result it is much harder to pay attention to the effect you might be making. See this Harvard Business Review article How to Make Sure Your Emails Give the Right Impression which comments Given the avalanche of email we receive each year — 121 messages per day, on average — it’s no wonder that we have become somewhat desensitized to its impact on our professional brand. We’ll spend hours polishing our LinkedIn profiles and revising our résumés, but hastily hit send on an unintelligible missive simply because we’re in a rush.
This Forbes blog from 2013 5 Ways Email Makes Your Employees Miserable comments We use email for everything related to communication and collaboration at work even though it's no longer the most effective way to do either.In my view despite some predictions of the demise of email things have not got better over the last 7 years.
There is according to this Daily Telegraph article even a tool to help you "write in a more polite, friendly tone" in your emails. There must be a problem here if someone is writing apps to solve it!
The other problem is that unlike letters which are generally sent to one person and maybe copied to a few others, email communication proliferates which means any mistake or offence caused is magnified many times over - see another Harvard Business Review Article Email Etiquette and the Perils of “Reply All”.
Nowhere are the risks of creating the wrong impression in emails more likely than in using this form of communication to manage your team. This is fraught with peril and scope for misunderstanding. See this article The Dangers of Using E-mail to Manage Employees which commences Communication is the foundation of a strong employment relationship. Ongoing, open, and effective communications with employees are fundamental ingredients for creating relationships that are based on respect. And employees who feel respected are more productive, more loyal, and have longer tenure. And then came e-mail!
I think personally that email and other forms of instant communication are great and enable different and more collaborative ways of working. However, we should consider more about how we use them and the effect they can have. As the English composer John Powell said “Communication works for those who work at it.”
And above all we should seek to be civil and polite and remember that as Theodore Roosevelt sagely observed “Politeness is a sign of dignity, not subservience.”
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