Business Communication Tips

Call, Email, or Text?

As technology changes, so does how we communicate. We are constantly trying to decide how we should communicate something with a particular person … email, text, phone call, in-person? I wanted to share some tips that most people agree to be good business etiquette regarding communication.

Medium	Reasonable Response Expectation	Appropriate Uses
Phone	Immediate (synchronous communication)	Important, urgent or complex topics
Email	Within 1 business day	Non-urgent items, when the responder may need time to gather info to respond, or if you want a record of the communication
Text	Varies greatly, typically 2 minutes to 2 hours … maybe never (see section below)	Informal topics that aren't urgent or important

Set Rules for Email-to-Phone Escalation

One Senior VP in a Fortune 500 company recently said that he's established a simple policy with his direct reports that has cut email volume by almost 40%: once a decision generates more than four emails total in a thread, someone needs to pick up the phone to resolve the issue.

Text/SMS Message Unreliability

Has anyone ever asked “Did you get that text I sent?” and you didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. Let me explain what might be going on there. Unlike email, SMS message delivery is not guaranteed. Instead SMS messages are delivered by service providers on a “best effort basis.” So when the network is congested most carriers automatically switch to a “store and forward mode”, which places all incoming text messages in a queue and defers their delivery until the network congestion and higher-priority voice traffic subsides. Usually that just means the messages are delayed, but in some cases those queues are never emptied or the messages may not be delivered until long after their relevance has passed. Various studies have shown that 1-5% of messages are lost entirely, even during normal operation conditions.

Severe Weather iPhone Apps

We recently had some severe weather and even reports of tornadoes, and I've heard several people say they weren't even aware that was happening (including me). Someone commented that because we now DVR most the TV we watch, the fact that we rarely watch live TV could be dangerous in those scenarios. Wouldn't it be cool if your iPhone could notify you whenever something like that happened?

Weather Alerts

View App

Simple, no-nonsense app for quickly notifying you of severe weather alerts in a chosen radius from your current location, including Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Snow Storms, Frost Advisories, Flood/Fire Warnings and hundreds more. Alerts you with sound even when the phone is lying unused with screen off!

One tip on this app … I would configure it not to alert you for a “Wind Advisory”. Those probably come more often than you would like to know about. The cool thing about this app is it is VERY configurable. You can specify exactly what types of events you want it to notify you about.

This app is $4.99, which I know seems like a billion dollars for an iPhone app (how could it possibly be more than 99¢). There are a few other less expensive apps out there like this, but none have near as good of reviews as this one. I won’t get into the technical part of it, but with apps like this there is a large chance that they might drain your battery if they aren’t well written. I haven’t used this for very long, but with all the good reviews I saw I doubt this one has that problem … so I recommend spending the $5 to get it over the other ones.

NOAA Hi-Def Radar

View App

Simple yet powerful app for viewing real-time animated weather radar images in vivid color on a highly responsive interactive map, with higher resolution images than any other radar app. It includes the NOAA warning boxes just like what you would see on the news. You can just click on a box and see the details of the warning it represents.

This app is by far the best one I’ve seen for animated weather radar images. It loads MUCH, MUCH faster, more responsive, and has better imagery. Thanks James for sharing this one.