ASSIGNMENT
This assignment will allow you to begin to consider channel and persuasion. It is difficult to tell whether e-mail is the greatest aid to productivity in the workplace or the primary reason you cannot finish your work in a given day. E-mail can be hard to interpret; what is it exactly your boss wants? People now tend to see a phone call as an intrusion. Similarly, after using e-mail for so many years, the medium (channel) is often considered private correspondence that can go global with the touch of a keystroke. While common sense should by now prevail, e-mail has become a primary type of evidence in civil and criminal investigations, which has the potential to take embarrassment to a new level. For this assignment:
• You are the director of marketing and design (product planning is also under your umbrella) for a successful manufacturing firm based in Southern California, just two miles from the coast.
• You and your staff are attached to the Southern California lifestyle.
• Corporate decides, and the VP of marketing tells you in a meeting that your team is moving to Durham, North Carolina, to be closer to the company's manufacturing plant. You feel you have assembled a high-performing team with people from marketing, advertising, sales, and product design, and that your team has made real contributions to your company. The people are smart and creative.
• You know these talented people can find other work even the present economy and wonder how you can convince them a move to even the mid-Atlantic South is worth exchanging for sea and surf.
You also know rumors are flying. You need to call a meeting but are scheduled to leave for an out-of-town trade show that afternoon. You want to communicate with your team as soon as possible (and comply with a request by your VP to do so) in order to set out the facts and begin the process of persuasion that might keep your team together. While sitting in the airport waiting for a delayed flight, you turn on your iPad and compose a concise but substantive message to your colleague.
Think the situation over, but feel free to compose the e-mail in class. When you are finished composing the message, you will e-mail it to one other person and cc me. We will then look at samples of student e-mails and see what responses they elicit. Write in order to advance your case to the extent possible in this message. You are framing a process. Think of the tone and details that might help you achieve your goal, which is to keep as much of the team together as possible.
Remember, you are not writing this message on behalf of a manager from California. As in any case, you are acting as if you yourself were that manager in this position.
In order for employers to maximize their messaging strategy, they need to understand which communication channels are most effective at reaching their employees.