Want Your Colleague to Answer Your Email? Don't Use These Phrases:
… When asked to name the most annoying phrase to read in an email, 25 percent of participants said "Not sure if you saw my last email" enraged them most. That was followed by phrases like "per my last email," "per our conversation," and "any update on this?" Apparently, people really don't like follow-up emails. Some of the other phrases that turned people off included "sorry for the double email," "please advise," "as previously stated," "as discussed," and "re-attaching for convenience."
The takeaway seems to be that there's no passive aggressive email follow-up that won't annoy the recipient. If someone hasn't responded to your email yet, it's probably because they don't want to, not because they didn't see your last message. This echoes previous findings on how people read into professional emails. HR professionals interviewed by Glassdoor, for instance, also included "as per my last email" as an example of an unprofessional email message. "It's passive aggressive and a very thinly-veiled attempt at passing blame for a project that has stalled," as Jon Brodsky of Finder.com told the site.
… If you want to get ahead, it's better to be assertive, clear, and direct in your emails, not passive aggressive and wishy-washy.
[h/t The Guardian]
(Via Mental Floss)
I don't do it too often, but I do use "Per our (meeting|call|Slack|chat)" to tie my email to communication that happened outside of email. For example, if someone asks me for a file in Slack that I have stored in email, it's easier to just forward the email than to save the attachment then attach it back into Slack. Of course that isn't an option in a conference call for face-to-face chat.
I don't know of a better way to handle this. Do you?
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