Best practices for internal communications with Casey Mank

On Top of PR podcast: Best practices for internal communications with guest Casey Mank and host Jason Mudd episode graphic

In this episode, Casey Mank, co-founder of Bold Type, joins host Jason Mudd to discuss best practices for internal communications at your organization.

Tune in to learn more!

Watch the episode here

5 things you’ll learn during the full episode:

Why you are not a great writer yet
Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF) and what it means
The importance of keeping everything you do forward-friendly
Why you should answer emails in a timely manner
How to decide what emails should be conversations

Resources

Listen to more episodes of the On Top of PR podcast.
Find out more about Axia Public Relations.
Find Bold Type on Twitter.
Connect and learn more about Casey Mank on LinkedIn.
Visit Bold Type for more information.
Contact Mark at casey@boldtype.us.

Additional Resources:

Additional Resources from Axia Public Relations:

Disclosure: One or more of the links we shared here might be affiliate links that offer us a referral reward when you buy from them.

Highlights

[04:46] You’re not a great writer yet

Writers who are fresh out of school sometimes lack judgment and the skills to be great writers for their profession. They need time and coaching to get there.

Jason: “You're not a great writer yet and even though you might hear you are or think you are, most of the time, your writing is not gonna be ready for the profession.”

Casey: “I would also say for anybody, like you're not a great writer alone.

Casey: “Writing is really social, and you need other people to look at your work, and you need feedback from real humans, not just you going over your draft alone again and again. So yeah, you're not a great writer alone. You need other people to react to your draft with you and give you that perspective”

Writing is a collaborative process that needs a team of people to make it perfect. Peer reviews and copy editors are essential to finalizing your piece.

Casey: “I think one thing that we hear a lot from managers and the people that are bringing us in and asking us to do training with their younger staff is there's sometimes a lack of judgment. That's the word that tends to come back to this sense of just good judgment about workplace communications etiquette, things like that. And that's because a lot of those skills are not things that anyone sits down and says like here's the tablet of the golden rules of professional communication that everyone knows and agrees on.”

[13:14] Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF)

Casey: “So (BLUF) bottom line up front — it just means you come in and you immediately say what is the main high-level takeaway from this communication? And then you can go back and say, and here's the background, and here's the details, and here's how we got here. And if you want more details, they're attached.”

We are just flipping the script from writing in a broad sense, then funneling down to your main point and your big takeaway being near the end, to leading with your main point.

Casey: “Getting to the main point like right up top rather than, again, the way we think our way into things might be like I'm writing an email and I'm thinking well I had a lot of meetings leading up to this conclusion, and I did a lot of research and I was gonna send you this last Thursday, but now I finally got the time to sit down and write this email. Nobody cares about that part.”

[19:46] Keep everything you do forward-friendly

Casey: “So no matter who you're emailing with, you might know them really well,[...], any email you send, there's a very permanent electronic record of it. And I want you to imagine that it can be on the front page of the New York Times because even if you are utterly adjacent to an interesting story, your emails really could end up on the front page of the New York Times if you just happen to be.”

Make sure that you wouldn't be embarrassed by anything you're sending.
Log out of your work email, go to your cell phone, and send your friend a text if you really need to vent your feelings about.

[23:15] Answering emails in a timely manner

Casey: “You should answer emails in a timely manner, which as we said can mean different things to different people, but you should acknowledge them as fast as you can, but that doesn't mean you need to answer them in a substantive way.”

You don’t have to give an in-depth answer right away, but you do need to acknowledge that you received the email.

Casey: “So I think it's important to understand the difference between acknowledging communications and substantively sitting there and answering everything in them.”

[28:00] How to decide what emails should be conversations

Casey: “We have this very simple XY access chart. I'm doing it if you're watching the video with my hands. If things are highly complex or highly emotional, they should be conversations. And the more simple and kind of unemotional things are, the better suited they are for email communication.”

We can speak and listen faster than we can sit there and draft an email.

Casey: “Well email is for trading back and forth tiny pieces of a conversation. And when you get horrible, really badly written emails is when people try to have a whole conversation, a whole one-sided conversation in a single email.”

About Casey Mank

Our episode guest is Casey Mank, co-founder of Bold Type, a woman-owned communications skills training firm that focuses on workplace writing skills. She's led writing workshops for organizations including Kellogg's, Viacom, and the PR Council. Mank has a background as an English teacher, teaching in different programs and schools around Georgetown University. She’s previously been at the business school and currently teaches in the school of nursing at Georgetown’s medical campus. Mank got into teaching professional teams how to do their workplace writing tasks and likes to stay on the line between academia and workplace writing.

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Transcript

- [Narrator] Welcome to On Top of PR with Jason Mudd, presented by ReviewMaxer.

- Hello and welcome to On Top of PR. I'm your host Jason Mudd with Axia Public Relations and I'm glad you're here because we've got a great show today. Let me welcome in our guest, Casey Mank. Casey, welcome to the show.

- Hi Jason, thanks for having me.

- Oh, I'm glad you're here. And today we're here to talk about workplace writing skills, specifically Casey Mank is co-founder of Bold Type, a woman owned communications skills training firm that focuses on workplace writing skills. She's led writing workshops for organizations including Kellogg, Sephora, and MasterCard. And today our topic is best practices for internal communications. And so that's what we're gonna talk about today. Let's see, and also just so our listeners know ahead of time, I usually don't mention this till the end, but you've got a special offer at boldtype.us/emailresources is that correct?

- That's right. We put together a packet of a few of our favorite email resources. There's a recorded workshop in there, a checklist, some other things. So definitely check that out.

- Awesome, that sounds great. So Casey, tell me a little about your inspiration for starting Bold Type.

- Absolutely, yeah. My business partner and I both have backgrounds as English teachers. So we have both taught in different programs and schools around Georgetown University. She's been at the School of Continuing Studies and the McDonough School of Business. I've been at the business school, we currently teach in the school of nursing over at the medical campus. And then we both got into teaching professional teams how to do their workplace writing tasks. So we really like to try to stay on that line between academia and workplace writing. We find that people come out of school not always with all the training that they need to do their workplace writing tasks. And then the same thing on the other side, trying to teach them the skills that they'll need for their workplace writing once they get there. So we kind of have a foot in both worlds. And when you're in the university, there's this great thing called the writing center. If you have a paper you're working on and you could use someone to talk it through with or some strategy, you can take it to the writing center and a tutor will sit down with you and look at your paper and go over it and you can learn writing skills that way. But people in the workplace don't always really have that. So we've brought a lot of our writing center tutoring training to workplace writing skills. So that's kind of the cross zone that our company sits in.

- Okay, I got it I got it. Let's set the table Casey, what is the problem? What is the issue that you solve? Like why do, so our audience is gonna be marketing and communications leaders at medium to large corporations. What is the need that they have that you're fulfilling?

- Absolutely. So I've ended up with a little bit of a practice area, a niche with PR shops and communication firms. And I love working with those groups because we can kind of jump right in at a higher level. So with those particular teams and the writing that they do, we're not teaching them rudimentary writing skills. They're already strong writers. They write a ton, a lot of them have communications and journalism and media studies backgrounds. So they're strong writers. Their problem is more that they are writing a ton of stuff every day and every week. And that they're rapidly task switching between different types of documents throughout the day. They might be writing in the voice of very different clients from minute to minute, very different contexts for very different platforms. So for them it's more switching between tasks and sort of getting things done faster rather than building any sort of rudimentary writing skills. So that's kind of how we help that audience in particular.

- Okay, yeah, that makes sense. So I find that, when I'm speaking to universities or I'm speaking to even colleagues, especially kind of more entry level colleagues, I'm always emphasizing that they need to understand at least the difference between a goal and an objective and a strategy and a tactic. So they can, might start to think, 'cause most students right outta college are very tactical driven and they're very much aware of what a goal is, but they don't really understand how to set a measurable objective and they don't really understand how to think like a strategist or how to be a strategist and how to become a trusted advisor. And some of that comes with time and with age and things like that, for sure. The second or third thing I typically lean on for them is just, you're not a great writer yet and even though you might hear you are or think you are, most of the time your writing is not gonna be ready for the profession. Now I will say, well I've gotten a little bit distant from working directly with interns and directly with entry level employees at my company, but the work I see that's being produced by them after it's at least peer reviewed by their manager and then copy edited by copy editor and I see it live on our blog or something like that, it's pretty good. So I don't know if it's our internal process or if students are getting better or what is our entry level professionals have gotten better. But I see where there's this need to kind of, you write when you're in college I guess and you get to a point, but then as you get more experienced, there's higher expectations or there's a different level of sophisticated in your writing, what do you see Casey, did you see some trends like that as well?

- Yeah, absolutely. So I love what you said, you're not a great writer yet. That's really, that's an awesome, I might borrow that one. I would also say for anybody, like you're not a great writer alone. So I think one thing with writing skills is that everyone has this image of people writing or editing alone in a tower and just scribing away. But actually, I'm a writing teacher and when I send things to my business partner and say, look this over, it's immediately obvious to her you don't need this word here, you don't need this whole sentence here. And it would never be obvious to me because I wrote it. So one of the things we try to teach everyone, not just junior staff, is that writing is really social and you need other people to look at your work and you need feedback from real humans, not just you going over your draft alone again and again. So yeah, you're not a great writer alone. You need other people to react to your draft with you and give you that perspective. As far as people joining the work force newly from school, I think one thing that we hear a lot from managers and the people that are bringing us in and asking us to do training with their younger staff is there's sometimes a lack of judgment. That's the word that we tend to come back to this sense of just good judgment about workplace communications etiquette, things like that. And that's because a lot of those skills are not things that anyone sits down and says like here's the tablet of the golden rules of professional communication that everyone knows and agrees on. It's more a skill that you, wouldn't that be nice? You just pick it up by sort of watching what other people are doing. And so a lot of people that are newer employees, their managers feel frustrated that they're maybe sending emails that are sloppy or unprofessional to casually sound like text messages, all those different things. Just lots of different issues with judgment is the word that we always come back to. So that's one. Yes, discernment another great one. Yeah, that's a common complaint that we hear.

- Okay, okay, that makes sense. So in my notes, I have that we're gonna cover email as an essential career skill. So, I don't know if I had a time machine, maybe I'd go back in time and stop certain historic events from happening that were really bad and one of those might be just getting rid of email altogether, that might be on my time machine journey. So tell me about why email's an essential career skill and then we can get more in details about why email sucks.

- Absolutely, yeah. Well, so first of all it's true when I tell people what I do sometimes I'll sort of jokingly say like, oh, I teach people to write better emails. And then they'll sort of jokingly say like, oh you should really come talk to some people on my team. And then we're both kind of like, but it's not really a joke, everyone has a lot of complaints about emails and it's a huge pain point. So one of the really interesting things that about this email writing task is that it's a huge part of every professional's day. Every job description you find on the internet asks for excellent verbal and written communication skills. And email is a huge chunk of that written communication skills piece. It's happening all the time. It's one of the main ways that we communicate, especially now. But for some reason, most students don't have a semester or a yearlong course in college that's email best practices. Instead they're writing five paragraph essays with intro and thesis and references and then they pop out into the workforce and it's like, okay now spend three to four hours of every one of your working days writing this kind of document an email. And so it's really strange that it's such a big part of everyone's life, but they're still doing a task that was more relevant 100 years ago before that was invented. So when we ask people in our email workshop, we ask every group, did you ever have formal training on email writing? And most people say no. There's always one or two people that are like, yeah, actually I've gotten to go to a really great seminar before and it's good for them. But most of the people will say like, no, no one has ever given me any formal email training either in school or at work. So then we follow up and say, well how did you learn then? And they just, they usually, it's people have to think for a minute and then they're like, well I kind of watched what other people were doing. And if you think about other skills that take up that much of our day at work, it's sort of laughable to imagine that people would just say like, oh I don't know, just see what your colleagues do. Like good luck.

- I've never thought of it that way, Casey, you raise a good point for sure that we spend a lot of time, on our email maybe as much time as we spend in meetings and there's definitely content out there about how to run more efficient meetings. So talk to me a little bit about email best practices.

- Yeah, absolutely. The one that, going back to that about the meetings, the one that really gets me is MBA students in particular, they get so much training on giving presentations. So they come out and they're these presentations superstars, but then they haven't learned how to write a good email. So it's just kind of funny. Yeah, okay, so email best practices that we could go into. There's so many that I could share. One thing that kind of relates to that question of people not necessarily getting formalized training on emails is that people also don't tend to have formalized sets of rules within organizations around email etiquette. So one email trick from a big picture level and then we can get into stuff that writers can do just on their own to send better emails of course is I would love it if teams within organizations would actually just take a few minutes to sit down and set out what their own best practices are around emails for emailing each other and their clients.

- So like email expectations?

- Yeah, yeah. So you wouldn't believe if we ask people in a workshop like, okay, we should respond to emails in a timely manner and everyone's like, yes we should. And so I say like, what's timely? Is it one hour, two hours, 48 hours before the end of the business day? And these are people from the same organization, even sometimes the same team. And we get different answers from everybody. So there hasn't been a discussion of this is what we all do, this is what we all expect. So that's one thing I would love if teams could just kind of sit down and say like, here's what we do and here's why for some of those questions.

- Is there a tool that we could ask you to share with our audience that's kind of like a email expectations worksheet that a team could work through?

- We should make one.

- Yeah, yeah let's do that.

- We should make one. Yeah, we've been thinking about it because it would be so easy to send people off with a series of like 10 questions around expectations and they could just align on them. So yeah.

- Is that something we could work on and add to the episode notes by the time this episode airs?

- Yeah, yeah I think we could, yeah.

- That would great.

- We have certain questions that come up quite often.

- Yeah, we'll make it a PDF with your logo and contact information on it and then if people work through it and they find benefit from it, they'll come back to you for more.

- Yeah, this is a great, getting me to actually work on that 'cause we've been thinking about it for a while.

- That's why I made you commit live here on a recorded.

- Yes, thank you. I'll appreciate that accountability, later yeah.

- You can send me hate mail later, hate emails later. So yeah, tell me more best practices.

- Yeah, so once we leave the level of the team and it's just down to you and you're writing your email on your own, going back to the what we learn in school versus what we learn at work sort of thing. In school, we're all taught to really write our way into things by which, I mean if you think of like a typical academic essay, you're gonna start really broad, since the beginning of human civilization, right? And you funnel down to your main point and your big takeaway might come somewhere near the end. But in any sort of workplace communication you wanna flip that over. And an acronym that we love that we teach in all our workshops is BLUF. BLUF stands for bottom line up front. Jason, have you ever heard that one before?

- I have not ever heard that before.

- Okay. It's really popular with military communicators. So sometimes if we have veterans in our classes or something, they're like, oh yeah, I know the BLUF but we're trying to bring it to the corporate community as well. So BLUF bottom line up front, it just means you come in and you immediately say what is the main high level takeaway from this communication? And then you can go back and say, and here's the background and here's the details and here's how we got here. And if you want more details they're attached. But getting to the main point like right up top rather than, again, the way we think our way into things might be like I'm writing an email and I'm thinking well I had a lot of meetings leading up to this conclusion and I did a lot of research and I was gonna send you this last Thursday, but now I finally got the time to sit down and write this email. Nobody cares about that part. So even if you think that way on the page, make sure you go back and delete that stuff that you might have written your way in kind of thing. Because that's a big waste of time for your readers. So that's one.

- Yeah, I was talking to somebody recently who teaches people how to be better public speakers and they were saying the worst thing you can do in a conversation and especially on stage is, I was talking to somebody last week, was it Thursday or Tuesday? I don't remember which. Hmm, I think it was Thur. Nope, nope, nope. It had to be Tuesday. And they're just going through this whole thing and they're like, and who was it I was talking to? It was that guy, what's his name? You know, whatever. And they're just sitting there and you're just like, oh my gosh, who cares? It doesn't matter to me what day it was. Doesn't matter to me who you're talking to. Get to your point, and they're like, the worst thing you do is do that in conversations, but even worse than that is doing it on stage in front of an audience. So anyway, Casey, that was a great tip. I'm looking forward to hearing more. We have to hit our halftime break here real quick. And on the other side I'll share what I've heard from military people about communications as well. And maybe that'll be helpful for our conversation today. With that we'll be right back on the other side more with Casey Mank.

- [Narrator] You're listening to On Top of PR with your host Jason Mudd. Jason is a trusted advisor to some of America's most admired and fastest growing brands. He is the managing partner at Axia Public Relations, a PR agency that guides news, social and web strategies for national companies. And now back to the show.

- Welcome back to On Top of PR, I'm Jason Mudd with Axia Public Relations. We want to thank Review Maxer for their sponsorship of our podcast and we wanna bring back Casey to the episode. So Casey, we just ended, you gave a tip about they use in the military. I did not serve and didn't have the pleasure of serving in the military, but one tip that I've heard that the military uses that I borrow often and often when I'm mentoring and training others is in the military. I'm told they say, when you're speaking to a group or when you're communicating with your troops or whatever, you tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, you tell 'em and then you tell 'em what you told 'em. And I use that a lot, especially when I see somebody sending an email that's just all over the place, I'm like, tell me what you're gonna tell me. Tell me and then tell me what you told me again.

- Absolutely, I love that advice. Yeah, I love that advice.

- So we have three more tips that you want to share today and I'm eager to hear all three of those 'cause again, email is like my nemesis. I have a love hate relationship. I finally weaned myself off of checking my email all day long to see what's in there. And so I guess, let me ask you a question. You talked about, having these covenants or these agreements with your own team of what responsiveness and timeliness looks like. I'm trying to move to where I'm only checking my email about three times a day, what do you think about that?

- I think that's an excellent practice depending on the business you're in. So if anyone is in a business that has super urgent things going on, this might be a little different. But most of us don't actually need to check our email more than two or three times appointed times throughout the day. And the rest of the time you really shouldn't be in there because it's a huge distraction and it's, yeah, it's one of the biggest sources of distraction at work. There's a pie chart floating around that shows it's like the biggest just interrupter of people. They're trying to do something else, they see a new email come in and suddenly it's like this very urgent feeling of oh I need to address this, I need to answer this. But what if you were driving at that moment or what if you were in a meeting, you wouldn't have even seen it for an hour or two and nothing would've happened. So definitely I love your approach, if you can set times and not be in the inbox at all times. And I also know most people have more than one inbox. I certainly do. I have three that are usually open and haunting me and I know people who have 10 for different roles that they are in. So.

- I can't even handle the one that I have. And in fact, my mom text me recently and said, what's your personal email address? And I'm like, well I think I check it like once a quarter so you better send it to my work address, whatever it is. So anyway, so speak. So yes, I'm in agreement with you that it's really hard to manage email. I'm trying to do three days a week or three times a day at appointed times as you as you said it. And I worry and I sense in my experience that whatever comes into my inbox next is what gets my attention when I'm just sitting in my inbox all day as opposed to having a focus and a prioritization and whatnot. And I also sense my employees do it that way too. So I'm always constantly kind of reminding them pause their inbox, close their email, whatever they have to do so they can focus on getting their priorities done and they'll be much more happier and productive as well. But let's hear your remaining tips please.

- Yeah, sure. So one that I would recommend is keep everything you do forward friendly. So no matter who you're emailing with, you might know them really well, especially I know we've kind of been on the topic of internal communications, you're emailing someone on your team, someone who might be your friend at work, any email you send, there's a very permanent electronic record of it. And I want you to imagine that it can be on the front page of the New York Times because even if you are utterly adjacent to an interesting story, your emails really could end up on the front page of the New York Times if you just happen to be. So think of it that way. I guess a less shocking, a less intense example would be think that every email you send could potentially be forwarded to your boss or your most persnickety client, account manager, whatever. You don't control where they go. So make sure that you wouldn't be embarrassed by anything you're sending and tacked onto that, one of my biggest pet peeves is when people have sort of catty or snarky side conversations and email threads. So you've got a thread with 30 people and then you've got your work friend sending you a reply to just you that's like, can you believe the rest of these people? And what they're don't do that. Please it gives me so much stress. Like please log out of your work email, go to your cell phone, and send your friend a text if you really need to vent your feelings about.

- Casey let me yes, and what you just said for our audience. So first of all, one time I forwarded a presentation to one of my employees and I just said, hey, you can skip to like 20 minutes in because the presenter is kind of all full of themselves and doesn't really get to any valuable content until 20 minutes in. And then eventually that email ended up being sent to the speaker when we were asking them to come and present at a conference or something like that.

- No!

- I to this day don't know if they saw that comment that I wrote 'cause it was a long email string, right? But I was just like, no, this was for internal so I made a mistake there my bad. And I hardly ever do that. So that was a rookie mistake. But then 'cause it was a great speaker obviously, or I wouldn't have shared it but I hate it when the first 20 minutes is just a commercial, and you don't really get to the meat. But then just recently I've been an expert witness in a PR issue and they're internal emails that get released as part of discovery and you would be amazed what some of these back and forth, even Google chat, the chat bot or whatever they were using to internal communication chats were turned over as part of discovery. The email exchanges were turned over as part of discovery and the way they're talking about the other party in this legal dispute through these emails is so off putting and really paints a negative picture towards the person who wrote it who is now gonna have to answer questions about this email exchange under oath, giving testimony in court. It's gonna be so embarrassing for them the things they said about this other person. And so it was just a reminder to me to talk to my team about this idea of, we think email is something that it's not because it's so easy to screenshot text messages, so easy to forward emails and we have to just really be on our best behavior. So I thank you for bringing that up.

- Yeah, yeah, it's an important one. Another would be, just shifting gears to email etiquette is, you should answer emails in a timely manner, which as we said can mean different things to different people, but you should acknowledge them as fast as you can, but that doesn't mean you need to answer them in a substantive way. So what I mean is if you see someone has emailed you with a bunch of questions and you're like, I don't have the answers to these questions, maybe this person is irritated with me, whatever the case may be, you should answer them right away and say, hi, I saw your email and here's when I'll be able to answer your questions. Even if that's two weeks from now. But don't just hide from the email for two weeks, which is making the entire situation where it's making them more irritated, not setting expectations. So I think a lot of people, they won't answer an email right away because they don't, it might take them quite a bit of thinking, they might have to go do a task before they can answer, but it's fine to say like, hey, I got your email and here's when I'll be able to put some time in on that, whatever it is. So I think it's important to understand the difference between acknowledging communications and substantively sitting there and answering everything in them.

- Yeah so I want to ask you another question about email. But first, as we're starting to wrap up, I wanna remind our audience that we talked during the break about putting an article written by your business partner that appeared on Forbes. We'll put a link to that in our episode notes about email management and inbox efficiency for lack of a better discussion for now. Also, if you could find that chart about how much time people spend in their email box, we'd love to offer that as well. And as we mentioned in the beginning at boldtype.us/emailresources, which we'll put a link to in the episode notes too. You have a special offer there for our audience, which we appreciate. And if people want to get a hold of you, they can reach you on LinkedIn or email you at casey@boldtype.us.

- That's great, yep.

- Here's my question for you. Two questions. One, how many questions should you pose to someone in a single email? And then at what point of the emailing back and forth do you just say, hey, too much back and forth, Let's have a phone call, let's get on Zoom, let's have a meeting where we can do some of this back and forth. So kind of what are your recommendations there, Casey?

- Yeah, absolutely. So on the first one, I usually am in the one ask for one email camp. Because people just don't have a lot of mental bandwidth and the more questions you ask them, especially if they're sort of like branching or building questions, like if you said yes above, then you know now this. It becomes very cognitively difficult and you're asking them to make a lot of decisions and do a lot of work. So if you can, I like the one ask one email rule. Sometimes I know there's scenarios where you need like seven questions answered all at once. In that case though, don't fold them into an email in a sneaky way. Like there's questions along the way. Make a list with numbers and say please, yeah, I need you to respond in line to each of these. And then it becomes almost like a little questionnaire that they're filling out in their response. People will often do a different color text with their answers and they just write in line, answer the questions and it's like almost a questionnaire. But you wouldn't wanna have five to seven questions interspersed throughout a paragraph narrative. Like, oh by the way, answer this little bit of narrative and then like, oh, can you also tell me this? That's horrible. You're asking people to search for things way too much. So what was the, off of your question again?

- Sure I'll just back and forth with you for a minute. I love the numbered list. It drives me nuts when someone just sends me a bunch of questions and they're not numbered and whatever makes it hard to follow through or follow it I think. I've also found that you have to kind of assess the person you're communicating with, and their communication style, especially if it's communicating with leadership or with a client or something like that. But I know busy clients, if you send them three questions in one email and they don't know the answer to one or more of them, they just won't respond at all. So I'd rather have my staff send three short emails back to back to back, even though that seems sounds obnoxious, where it's just one question. So that if they can answer that one question on their phone between planes or on the train or between meetings, 'cause we have to realize a lot of, in our case, a lot of our clients are in meetings all day long and so the last thing they want to do is read long paragraph emails. So if you have three questions, send them one question at a time so they can just simply reply back with a short answer and clear it out their inbox.

- Yeah.

- My other question was how many times do you go back and forth in emailing before you're like, eh, too much emailing, let's just knock this out.

- Yeah, so we have this very simple XY access chart. I'm doing it if you're watching the video with my hands. If things are highly complex or highly emotional, they should be conversations. And the more simple and kind of unemotional things are the better suited they are for email communication. So if you think you're gonna need to do a lot of back and forth in order to collaborate with someone, get on the same page, work something out, like it's complicated, maybe the email you're sending really should just be, we need to have a 15 minute Zoom and that's the email. Because those things happen a lot faster, out loud. We can speak and listen faster than we can sit there and draft an email. So complexity and then anything emotionally charged because there's a lot of room for tone to be misread in writing.

- So is that something else we can share on our--

- It is. And let me just say, because I developed as in partnership with Sarah Gershman, who's the CEO of Green Room Speakers. So she's a speaking coach. So when we do a workshop together, we made this chart to say when should you be speaking to someone and when should you be emailing them? Because those are our two areas of expertise. We have to shout her out and say we came up with this thing.

- We'll do that for sure.

- That's all right?

- Yeah yeah. So I appreciate that very much. I've been, I'm gonna date myself. I've been using email, I just, as you were talking, just calculated I think for almost at least 30 years and almost 35 years now. So that makes--

- It's a lot of email.

- Really young. Yeah, I've sent a lot of emails I'm sure. And but my point is that it really has just dawned on me in the last six months to what you just said. If somebody sends you an email and it's emotional or turning defensive or something like that, don't respond, get on the phone or get meet with them in person because it's gonna be way more productive that back and forth, which I think is so valuable. And there's constantly times where I'll be talking to my team and I'm like, imagine if we tried to have this 30 minute conversation over email, how long would that take? It takes so much longer. And my biggest pet peeve Casey, is you have to proofread your emails. At least once, you're wordsmithing and doing all this work and it's like, I could have said this in 30 seconds where I spent an hour now typing it. But my real point is that, for example, I have a call today that's gonna be a difficult conversation and it started out as an email a week or so ago and I just say, let's get on calendars and work through this. You know, obviously it's not urgent or time sensitive, but it is a little bit of an emotional thing and I just knew as I was reading my email response, I'm like, this isn't good. Now of course the reason it's taken a while to have the meeting is vacations and hurricanes and stuff like that. So but we don't have to solve this issue until the end of the year. So we have plenty of time, but I could tell it was gonna escalate. And so I'm just like, bring it in, let's have a real conversation as opposed to trying to go back and forth through email where like you said, it's a little bit emotional 'cause money is involved and things like that and we just wanna make sure everybody's on the same page.

- Yeah, absolutely. Well email is for trading back and forth tiny pieces of a conversation. And when you get horrible, really badly written emails is when people try to have a whole conversation, a whole one-sided conversation in a single email and they're just like, if you're thinking this then no. And if you're gonna say this then here and it's like a super long email. Email's meant for trading manageable small pieces of information back and forth in a slow way. So if that's--

- And back in the day used to be a way to exchange attachments, right? Files right. And that was very helpful. Now we're all hopefully in the cloud and will snafu. This week where somebody sent me an attachment and it wasn't the most recent version and so you're just like, ugh I feel like I'm in the nineties again. And anyway, so, but they were like, no, no I sent you the right version. And I'm like okay, here's examples of where you didn't send the right version and how we have to now work backwards. So anyway, I'm so glad we no longer exchange drafts of attachments.

- I have a feeling. Yeah I have a feeling we're all gonna be laughing about that even in like five years. Like can you believe, and it'll just be like AI will be managing the versions. We'll be checking and.

- Well I'm laughing at it now and it was just painful on Tuesday when.

- You're already laughing.

- Yeah I've been laughing at it for a while, especially when I know other people are still doing that. You know, 'cause it used to be Casey, for those that don't know this, you'd send an email to six people and say, hey I wrote this, please review it and give me feedback. And then you're in there changing it and making updates and then you go to send it and you see three other people have already responded with other updates and so you're like, I gotta redo all my updates, so.

- I don't know about, used to be, my students still do this all the time, they send their papers to three different professors and then they get three different versions back and then they're like, oh no.

- It makes me wanna retire honestly, if that came back as a practice, I'd be like, I'm out. So Casey, this has been a lot of fun. I appreciate you entertaining my thoughts and questions along the way. I'm sure both of our email boxes are blowing up right now and I would say, stay focused on what we do best and the noise will take care of itself later and we can always get to it later kind of thing. So that's at least my mantra right now.

- Yeah, thank you for sharing, especially your email forwarding horror stories because I will definitely add those to my cache of scary stories to tell people when I'm cautioning them. Thank you for sharing those.

- Yeah, and it was just a simple mistake. The person didn't do it maliciously, they just forgot that I said something unfavorable in the comments and maybe if the speaker heard it, maybe they'll get some candid feedback from an audience. I mean at the end of the day, I remember one time I was on a webinar just mentioned this and it was three young professionals who were first time entrepreneurs looking for investors to come in and make an investment in this idea they had and they invited me to be one of those investors. Well 20 minutes into the presentation there's three entrepreneurs. The second one is still reading through their, or covering their bio and their background. These guys are like two years outta college at the most and I left the webinar and the guy called me and he's like, hey, what happened, whatever. And I said, I can't sit there for 30 minutes and listen to three entry level college graduates tell me their background for that long. You went to college here, you studied this, you did that and you got this vision for this new company and you're looking for seed money to get started. That's all I need to know.

- Bottom line up front.

- What's that?

- Bottom line up front.

- Yes, yes, exactly. And I just told 'em, I said, you've got very wealthy, successful, busy individuals on this call and I voted with my feet, I walked out, because it was just taking too long to get to it. And I hope that was a valuable lesson to them. And I didn't say no, I just said this isn't the right format for me 'cause it was just taking too long. And I think what they were trying to overcome was their lack of experience, but we all knew that already. So just like you said, get to the bottom line up front would've helped them a lot. So Casey, thank you again for being a guest on our show today. I was really glad to have you and I look forward to staying in touch with you.

- Yeah, thanks for having me.

- Yeah, be well my pleasure. And with that, we've had another episode of On Top of PR. Thank you for tuning in. If you know someone who would benefit from this message and I've gotta believe all of your colleagues would please share this episode with them. They'll thank you and we'll thank you and we appreciate you allowing us the opportunity to help you stay on top of PR. Have a great day.

- [Narrator] This has been On Top of PR with Jason Mudd presented by Review Maxer. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode and check out past shows at ontopofpr.com.

Best practices for internal communications with Casey Mank, co-founder of Bold Type

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5 things you’ll learn during the full episode: