Dealing with long emails - the Latin American edition
Because life doesn’t stop even when you’ve been working from home I’ve had a crazy few weeks getting ready to move country and tie up a range of personal and professional tasks that haven’t been quite finished. Unfortunately it’s bring me up hard against my cultural style of using email and communications.
My first email usually starts like this
‘Dear (person who hasn’t done the thing that they said they’d do for me),
I hope all is well and you are coping with quarantine. Unfortunately I don’t seem to have (the thing I asked you for) and need to get this tied up by (date required) as discussed. Please let me know if there are any issues that need my input and let me know the new expected completion date/s.
Best wishes, Rebecca’.
Pretty clear and asked for 2 pieces of information - anything I need to do, and a new date for the action.
This is the style of the replies I’ve been getting.
Dearest Rebecca
(Full paragraph of small talk. Updates on the person’s family, the kids remote schooling, their thoughts and fears about covid. Some discussion on how hard they are finding the adjustment to remote work. ‘Lucia has really been struggling with not being able to see her friends all day and is missing her ballet class’ and so on and so forth.)
The process to complete the action is really complicated. (Full description of all the internal and external steps involved in the action. In most cases this task has been outsourced because it does require technical knowledge, but as I don’t really need or care about the fine detail as I have outsourced the task to save time and/or energy. Complaints about how slow every step in the process has been. Sometimes, unfortunately not often, the information I have asked for might be inbedded in this section.)
The fourth paragraph usually details how hard the person is finding the current situation and other meeting demands on other clients.
Final paragraph usually deals with some broader thoughts and opinions on the national strategic direction of Chile, with the broad blame for problems being laid on the opposite side of politics.
Send off, often without name.
Anyway I’ve been getting immensely frustrated with the length of the emails and the difficulty in trying to get direct answers as I deal with a whole lot of emails each day. Additionally the wordiness of the replies makes in very hard to find relevant information.
This, of course, is a classic problem when you work between cultures. So I’ve been trying to appreciate the high points of the Chilean style - namely that it very lovely to have people trying to make a genuine connection with you in the workplace by sharing information and that having a family isn’t seen as a weakness for the men I deal with. And this has been a very challenging time for many Chilean workers who are not used to working from home at all, let alone with kids underfoot (currently on week 16 of total lockdown including the schools and offices (don’t event ask how that’s going here!).
At the same time I’m urging my Chilean colleagues to try and read emails from foreigners and make sure they answer all the questions included (even if any dates are only an estimate or depends on other tasks). Include white space and dot point any important information including things that you need me to do. And finally, don’t complain about your internal issues or demands from other clients when you talk to me! Maybe I’ll look back on these 3 pages emails with fondness one day, but in the current high stress environment it’s something I’m finding quite challenging.
What have you found challenging about working and communicating abroad?
