Overview

In your work environment, you will need to communicate with your fellow employees. Most often, this communication will take the form of memos. The inter-office memo reports on the situations you deal with every day in the office. Usually, memos involve evaluating your fellow employees and their work situation. With the advent of the computer and the Internet, e-mail has also become a dominant medium for inter-office communications.

Memos, and to some degree e-mail, are an important part of the way companies reach decisions and keep track of projects and processes. However, when dealing with interpersonal business communications, you always need to keep your coworkers' feelings in mind. Knowing effective ways to write memos will help you make a good impression without alienating coworkers.

Inter-office communication is currently undergoing sweeping changes. Many workers suffer from e-mail overload and have to spend at least two hours of any given work day just answering e-mail correspondence. But that's just the changes visible on the surface. A deeper sea change is underway.

Memos and e-mail are simply the most external signs of the greatest trend to hit the workplace: collaboration and team projects. Memos and e-mail mostly exist to support collaborative processes, from committees to teams to work groups. For these groups to function effectively, something that can only be called 'real time technical communication' has to take place. These are not formal documents per se, documents committed to paper. These are documents drafted on the fly, part of an interactive dialogue within various connected groups.

The part of the collaborative support process one sees more rarely comes out of a new field called 'computer-supported collaborative work.' This subspecialty incorporates e-mail and memos, but has become much more. One of the earliest products in this market, ubiquitous at large corporations, was Lotus Notes. In addition to various forms of messaging, it also allowed collaborative document sharing and editing within the context of a larger database.

Under Hot Topics, in the section on Electronic Communication, there is a subsection on computer-supported collaborative work for those who want to learn more. Newer products with graphical interfaces have evolved to compete with Lotus Notes, products that connect collaborative documents with project and meeting management software, threaded bulletin boards, chat rooms, instant messaging, online voting, and group calendars. A great deal more will come out of this field in the near future as well.