Nudjed Round Table

On Monday 23rd February I was a guest speaker for Nudjed at the Life Science Centre in Cardiff, which is an amazing centre set up by the Welsh Government to fuse together life sciences in Wales.  Nudjed helps companies to improve the health and wellbeing of their workforce by educating them and ‘nudging’ them towards a healthier lifestyle.

So along with a number of HR Managers from companies in Cardiff, we talked about some really interesting stuff, including communication within organisations and the danger of email.

We looked at what impact email has on our day to day communication in business.  Email doesn’t let you get across the non verbal signals that a big proportion of communication is made up of – it has no tone.  When we speak to someone on the phone, 70% of our communication is made up of tone and 38% when we speak face to face.  In email tone is lost. Let’s ask the question is email effective or is it productive?  We may think to ourselves sending an email is really effective but it is only effective if somebody reads the email, it’s only effective if your message gets through to the person you’re sending the email to.  We talked about the impact of this and I told a story that Dr Paul Thomas who I’ve previously worked with told me, about a CEO he worked with who used to send an email to over     40 000 staff every day.  Dr Thomas told the CEO that no one read his emails.  The CEO said ‘of course everyone reads my emails,’ so Dr Thomas decided to put it to the test.  He sat in the office and watched when the CEO sent his email out, and guess what? Lots of people just pressed the delete button.  The CEO still didn’t believe that this was happening, so Dr Thomas added a note to the end of one of the CEO’s email which said if you read this email we’ll give you a £1000, just let us know you’ve read it by replying to it. How much did they have to pay out? Zero.  The CEO was crafting this email every single day and nobody was reading it – not very effective or productive I’m sure you’ll agree.

So the moral of the story is you need to think about what an email is going to give you. Think about how effective it’s going to be, think about when you want someone to read it, think about the impact that it will have.  Never use an email to convey emotion, that is a big TLO no no.  A good measure as to whether you should send an email or not, is to ask yourself how you would feel if you received this email.  And if it leaves the reader asking a question, it needs a conversation instead.  Email should be used for information purposes only, not as a way of discussing things (back to my conversation point above).

I was thrilled to be the guest speaker for Nudjed and I’ve been asked to do some more work with them.  They are a wonderful company really promoting health and wellbeing within the workplace, and I’m so looking forward to working with them again.

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