Vicki Walker, a financial controller in New Zealand, was fired for sending confrontational e-mails to her coworkers at ProCare Health. How confrontational, you ask? Take a look at this quote from the New Zealand Herald:
The email, which advises her team how to fill out staff claim forms, specifies a time and date highlighted in bold red, and a sentence written in capitals and highlighted in bold blue. It reads: “To ensure your staff claim is processed and paid, please do follow the below checklist.”
To better let you appreciate the horrifying nature of this e-mail, I will simulate it here:
8/31/2009 12:00PM: TO ENSURE YOUR STAFF CLAIM IS PROCESSED AND PAID, PLEASE DO FOLLOW THE BELOW CHECKLIST.
Now, I understand that’s pretty offensive to look that from an aesthetic point of view, but is it just cause to terminate someone’s employment? I don’t think so. And apparently, neither did the New Zealand legal system, which awarded her $6,000 in lost wages and $11,500 in punitive damages from ProCare.
What’s amazing to me about this case is that the employer read so much into the use of color and capitalization. I can only imagine that each time he received an e-mail in this style, he pictured Ms. Walker shouting at him at the top of her (perhaps blue) lungs. Yet no such thing occurred. Instead, an assumption was made about the tone and intent of the e-mail simply from its formatting, which ultimately resulted in job loss. Was an effort made to instruct Ms. Walker in polite, formal online communications in a work setting? Was training provided on the intricacies of computer-mediated communication? Did her supervisor ever simply ask her to please tone the e-mails down?
I imagine we’ll never really know. But it does make me wonder – does such e-mail training exist, and would it be useful to most organizations? Most people learn to communicate online by necessity; I doubt many people ever take the time to learn to write e-mail, as might have been done with pen-and-paper letters many years ago. Instead, I imagine most discover one day that they need to write an e-mail and simply do it.
From my experience in organizations so far, that has produced a hodgepodge of writing styles within the office. Some people write in all caps, some in peculiar fonts, some with jarring background images, some ignoring spell check, and some simply eschewing proper grammar altogether. Does such lack of consistency hamper intra-organizational communications, or is such self-expression valuable? Unfortunately, research is sparse.
Although if I could find a business that wanted to help, perhaps that could change…
In order to put our best foot forward, I commissioned a new logo be designed by the fine folks at Hatchwise. The idea is that you create a contest with a cash reward where graphic designers compete to design your logo/business cards/whatever. Designers submit their ideas and after 10 days, you choose your favorite, at which point the winning designer gets the money you put on the line and you get lossless digital copies of your brand-new logo. You can get quite a few submissions, several of which are usually quite good.
I put down a $150 reward (minimum is $100, although some go as high as $500) and my total cost was about $210 (for special highlighting and prominent placement in the current contests list, similar to eBay‘s system). My contest in particular got 133 entries. About 25% of those were revisions that I requested because I wasn’t happy with a particular version submitted. That put the final number of unique entries around 100, and thus the cost somewhere around $2.10 per entry, which is ridiculously cheap for graphic design. Many graphic design firms, for comparison, charge something like $200 for 4 designers to create 4 logos with up to 2 revisions each. There is a little less assurance of quality here, but with a high enough award, you are practically guaranteed something will jump out at you.
In my case, there were about 5 final contenders to win and about 12 versions of the winning entry, the best of which I now dramatically reveal.
I chose it because of 1) the eye-catching color scheme, 2) the easy-to-grasp visual metaphor. Technology (the circuitry) powers learning (the light bulb) and makes the gears turn (also a thinking metaphor). Simple, straight to the point, and something you can grasp on first glance.
TNT Lab, by the way, stands for the “Technology iN Training Laboratory.” Yes, it’s an acronym. Yes, it uses a letter from the middle of a word. But that’s par for the course. Pretty soon, I’ll be launching the lab web page at tntlab.org, but we’re not quite there yet. I’ll post again when things are fully up and running.
Members of the US Army are being asked to update army field manuals in a wiki format, so that any soldier anywhere in the organization can help write Army doctrine. Now that’s a pretty big change – the Army is traditionally a very rigid top-down organization, with commands coming from the top, and orders being followed at the bottom. That also reflects a very strong culture strength, such that getting soldiers to participate in such a system is going a bit slowly. And of course, another barrier is that anonymity is not permitted. Soldiers need an ID card that allows them access to Army online resources, and then any edit they make is quite publicly tied to their real name.
However, there is support. One officer, for example, expanded on a vague description of his role (“as collectors of combat information during the platoon intelligence activities.”) by providing an example of this role from his tour in Iraq.
From a training perspective, this is an interesting tactic. The argument is that the over-500 field manuals currently in use in the Army are simply too big a logistical challenge to keep up-to-date. Because of this, most soldiers are essentially getting on-the-job training anyway, learning from the others in their own units. Why not convert this information so that it can be shared across the world?
As for the effectiveness of this kind of procedure for training purposes, we’ll see. The possibility of a field manual changing from moment to moment may have unintended consequences. For example, who is responsible when Soldier B takes advice that Soldier A has entered into the wiki and a civilian or squadmate gets killed? Some guides are being kept un-editable, perhaps for exactly that reason.