Maybe Google finally got it right in its social network approach: stop, step back, analyze and then react. Grant McCracken explains this concept in his blog.

Food for thought.

[...] Oaks grow strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressure.  - Peter Marshall

In the life of a startup, there is always a lot of pressure resting on the shoulders of it’s founders. After all, they are taking most of (if not all) the risks and they want return on investment. At this point, it looks very tempting to drop off a little bit of this pressure on the employees in order to speed up things. Diamonds are made under pressure, right?

According to the influencial psychologist Donald Olding Hebb, there is a strong relation between pressure and performance. Little pressure is very similar to too much pressure : productivity drops. There is an optimal level of pressure that needs to be reached. Below this level, the work looks boring or uninteresting. Above it, there are chances the employees will feel like they’ll never make it or that the energy they need to deploy largely outweighs the results. If the perceived outcome is smaller than the perceived efforts needed to get there, motivation and the team’s health might get hurt.

For tech startups, rushes are common. Software changes fast, and overnight deliveries are hard to avoid but, efforts should be deployed to keep those at a minimum. Developing a product is a marathon. No one needs an exhausted team after the first sprint.

More reading on this topic :

• How A Leader Needs To Think Like A Plumber
• Atlassian’s FedEx Day – Engineers running wild building non-core projects delivered over-night (similar to Google’s 20% playtime program)

To me, e-mail in a business is a communication process (or channel), and there is no precise technique that can be implemented to make it 100% efficient. In fact, processes should be unique because teams and organisations are unique. If a process worked well in another team, there is no way to tell if the process will also work fine without any tuning in another context. These processes and channels are so glued to the business that they are an inherent part of the culture and the business itself. And yes, bad e-mails can be bad for business.

Can people learn how to write good e-mails? Yes! I believe people can learn to write good e-mails (and communicate globally in a better way) as anyone can learn to play tennis and become a better player. Being a good communicator is a skill that can be learned and practiced, right?

To get you started, beth Kollo of the University of Washington put up a proposal for fixing and recreating e-mail that Scott Berkun comments in How To Fix Email: A Radical Proposal.

Want to get better (or help someone get better)? Here are 6 tips that can help you in How to write good e-mails. Seth Godin posted on his blog a nice checklist that is a good place to begin.

Good writing!

I believe communicating via e-mail (I mean good and efficient communication) is something people can learn. It is like learning to practice a sport or like learning to write software. In all cases, it takes practice, and some people are better than others at first.

In distributed teams and in (especially) startups, e-mail is a very common communication channel. Your business can benefit a lot by taking the time to teach how to write good e-mails and showing the right example. Here are a few (obvious) tips to help you getting started.

6 tips to write better e-mails

1. Go straight to the essential.
   When people read their e-mails, they take a limited amount of time to do so. They are often taking a few minutes right in the middle of a complex task only to get distracted and they don’t wan’t to enter a 6 pages long e-mail. Go straight to the essential, removing everything that does not need to be written there. Some teams even skip the usual “hi, how are you” line to keep it shorter (this one mostly depends on your business culture). In all cases, keep in mind who you are writing to and adapt your e-mail to your recipient.
2. Keep it simple.
   If people do not take the time to read long e-mails, neither do they take to the time to read complex e-mails. Keep it simple. If you absolutely need to write about something complex, maybe the e-mail is not the right communication channel to use. A short e-mail does not provide much context, and a complex problem can sound much more complex to the recipient without that context.
3. Write about facts.
   Emotions and feelings are not easy to describe in an e-mail without breaking the two above rules. Keep e-mails for facts and short questions. Again, everything that would require a long or a complex e-mail might be a lot easier to communicate over the phone or in person.
4. Avoid everything that could be misinterpreted.
   One thing about written communication (e-mails, letters, etc.) is that they only communicate the message itself. It says nothing about the relational aspect of the communication. In fact, 7% of the communication is about the message. The other 93% is about para verbal (how you say what you say) and non verbal messages (your body language). Most e-mails are misinterpreted because there were no body language to explain the things that are not said.
5. Avoid everything that could not be read in public.
   In today’s organizations, most communications (phone, email, etc.) are recorded for audit. This is very useful for mangers when it comes to improving the processes, but for users, it means that not every message can go over these channels. Whining about your boss over e-mail is not a very good way to keep a good relation with him.
6. Review before hitting the send button.
   Reviewing is useful for fixing typos, forgotten words and such. It is also a very good idea to review it as if you were the recipient himself. Putting yourself in the skin of your contact and changing the wording accordingly to his personality might get you better results.

These are pretty obvious but always useful tips to keep in mind when writing an e-mail. Feel free to add yours to the comments.

It is common to see people misinterpret the messages we try to communicate. One of the dangers in providing feedback is that the concerned team member might take more responsibility for himself for the results than we would credit them. This egocentric bias can cause the individual to feel directly attacked : he might believe his identity or personality are the root causes. But, because a task was not completed as it should have been does not mean the team member is incompetent. In fact, the fear that the message can be misinterpreted can easily slow down a manager from providing essential feedback.

Instead of focusing on the risks, managers should focus on the bright side of critical feedback. Giving good feedback is giving your team member an opportunity to grow and to become a better person. It takes courage, but it is very valuable for an individual and, ultimately, for the team itself.

What do you think is making providing critical feedback a hard task for you?

Should businesses help their employees by providing them workshops or documentation?

In my humble opinion, businesses (or startups) that use e-mails as their primary communication medium should take any cost-effective measures to optimize their communications. Communicating is a process (a critical process). Good communication will smoothen other processes, reduce conflicts, boost the performance of your employees and even make their happier.

Workshops or documentation is a good first step, but the best way to teach your team is by example. Leaders always do their best to communicate effectively by e-mail. Their e-mails should be:

• clear, concise and strait to the point;
• complete, well structured and well written;
• important (sadly, too many sent e-mails are useless).

Quoting the great mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662) : « I made this [letter] very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter ». We need to take the time to optimize our written communications and, most of all, give the right example to follow.

Do you know good techniques to make e-mail communication more efficient. What is a good e-mail for you?

There is a section about writing good e-mails in Scott Berkun‘s book Making Thing Happen.

Adding more people in a project won’t necessarily make it happen faster. Software engineering is complex. First, it definitely takes some amount of time to the newcomer to understand and get used to the existing environment (existing code, development environment and most importantly, the team). Second, increasing resources also increase communication overhead. The information flow must go through all team members, in a clear and efficient way. Finally, you might also drain your existing resources’ energy and time by asking them to train and to coach the others.

For late software development projects, sometimes finding better ways to do more with less, simplifying processes and eliminating any nuisance to the team is better than giving more.

The concept comes from and English logician, William of Ockham. Simply put, Occam’s Razor suggests that when analyzing a problem, all unnecessary details should be discarded so everyone can focus on the core of the problem. Also, options that lack simplicity should be discarded. This suggests that the simpler solution might be the better one (and yes, this method has it’s limits).

Reading on the topic, I discovered that this method is commonly used as a part of the scientific method and that Avinash Kaushik likes the concept too.

What do you think?

However, precision is not accuracy. Someone can say, “Your package will arrive in 5 days, 2 hours and 15 seconds.”. That is pretty precise, but it may not be accurate. On the other side, “Your package will arrive in 5 days.” is not very precise, but it can be accurate.

An accurate answer or estimate is, most of the time, more precious than a precise one.