Practice Management Alert

Question: We have several remote coders that work for our outpatient clinic. Because they all work from home, much of the communication between team members happens via email. I keep getting complaints about one person. The other coders say her emails are always negative, condescending, and unprofessional. I don’t think she actually means to be so negative, but rather she is just bad with email. What can I do to help her improve her email communications?

New York Subscriber

Answer: Miscommunication via email is not uncommon. That’s because, more than the actual content, it’s the tone of your e-mail messages that others will remember, says David F. Swink, co-founder and chief creative officer of Strategic Interactions, Inc. based in Fairfax, Virginia. 

Unlike face-to-face communication, e-mail doesn’t afford recipients the benefit of non-verbal cues such as pitch, tone, facial expression, and body posture. In the absence of such cues, e-mail lacks an emotional component, explains Daniel Goleman, author of Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. “The typed words are denuded of the rich emotional context we convey in person or over the phone,” he writes in The New York Times article entitled “E-Mail is Easy to Write (and to Misread).” 

As a result, if a message isn’t clear, a recipient may “read the most negative emotions and intentions into it,” Swink warns in a Psychology Today article entitled “Don’t Type at Me Like That! Email and Emotions.” Unfortunately, this may be the problem with your coder. 

Try talking with your employee and explaining that while you think it is unintentional, her communications can come off negatively. Offer her the following five tips to help her maintain an appropriate tone and convey her message clearly:

1. Avoid capital letters: Writing an e-mail in “ALL CAPS” is the equivalent of shouting at the recipient, says Michael Hyatt in his blog article “Email Etiquette 101.” In addition to being rude, it’s all the more difficult to read, he comments.

2. Don’t be sarcastic: Stick to the facts, Hyatt suggests. Otherwise, the recipient may find your side comments offensive, especially if you have cc’d the message to others. 

3. Check your priority: Don’t send every message with a “high priority” flag, Hyatt insists. People might stop paying attention to your e-mails if you insist that every message is urgent. Think about how important your message is before you decide to include a priority flag. 

4. Avoid abbreviations: Don’t use short forms of words and text phrases, such as “lol” and “btw,” Swink asserts. These make your message look casual and unprofessional.

5. Be conservative with punctuation: Be careful not to make excessive use of punctuation, Swink says. Too many exclamation marks, commas, etc. are confusing for a reader.

You can also suggest your employee enlist a co-worker’s help — even yours — if she is not sure of the tone of her e-mail message. Have another person read it over first and give feedback, Swink suggests. If nobody’s available, she can save the e-mail in the drafts folder. Give herself a couple of hours, Swink advises. Then re-read the e-mail and make sure that the message, as well as the underlying meaning, if any, is communicated clearly.