Say you’re writing an email to someone.
This requires a bit of empathy.
Who will be reading this email? What do they want of me? What do I want of them? Who are they? What do they know about me? What do they know about the topics of which I am writing? How can I read the room, so to speak?
Say the person who you’re writing an email to is holding a metaphorical knife. A knife that severs your job. Severs your ability to provide for yourself and family. And you know nothing about this person. They are entirely anonymous and the best you can tell they know nothing about you, your job, the circumstances, or anything at all that would help you craft this email.
Could you write this email? Could you write it well?
Email has been in the news a bit lately, in just this context. Like:
Federal Workers Again Receive Email Asking Them to Detail Accomplishments
Political!
It’s not entirely cut and dry. Most of us, I’d wager, are in favor of efficiency. Particularly in government, where we want processes to work cleanly for us. And we want our tax money to feel like it’s being used well.
So some sort of way to measure and improve that efficiency seems more than fair.
And what about an efficient way to measure that efficiency? Also good? Perhaps an email just asking people what they are doing is smart. Seems like a pretty easy task. If you can’t do that, maybe it really is a sign you aren’t particularly effective in your job.
But I’m not sure that’s fair.
Email, like any other form of communication, requires this empathy on both sides.
Here’s a copy of the email reported:
This isn’t a surprise to those federal workers. Apparently this is the second of such requests recently. When your job is at risk, you know about it. They are biting their fingernails already.
An anonymous person holding a knife at you is asking these questions. Not your boss, not your boss’ boss, no someone who is clued in from anywhere near the organization.
What if your federal job doesn’t involve being in front of a computer much at all and you missed it?
What if you’re amazing at your job but you aren’t particularly good at writing?
What if you’ve recently broken both of your arms and are on leave or are doing something else constructive at work aside from computer work?
What if you did a lot at work but it’s really niche and complicated and requires nuance and context to understand, so explaining in 5 bullet points will sound like gibberish?
Jobs tend to be pretty niche. Ask a random federal worker exactly what their day to day job is it’s probably not “chop carrots and bread chicken filets” it’s probably more like “I work for the VA doing project management on the computer system for processing claims. Part of it is in legacy MUMPs and it needs to stay that way as we don’t have the budget or staff to re-write it, but it does need to continue working so that claims are processed for our nations vets. There was a bug with leap years that resulting in the wrong date on some forms. That’s one of 45 things I’ve worked on this year.”
So it requires empathy on the side of the (guy holding knife) that is reading these emails (lol). And it requires empathy on the side of the threatened employee writing these emails. They need to take a wild guess at who is doing that reading and evaluating the emails and write toward them, which will be mistargeted at best.
Again all this isn’t entirely cut and dry. I do think it’s a reasonable ask for employees to be accountable and productive. I also think it’s reasonable to question the methods for determining this.
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