Latest news with #EmilyPost'sBusinessEtiquette
Business Insider
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
When someone important emails you without a subject line
Alison Leiby remembers feeling her heart beat harder when she saw the email without a subject line appear on her phone. It was from Anna Wintour, longtime editor of American Vogue. As Leiby tapped on the message and waited for it to load, she felt a bolt of anxiety and thought, "Oh, God. What is about to happen?" To her relief, Wintour's two-sentence message offered congratulations on a one-woman, off-Broadway show Leiby created and starred in. Wintour had been in the audience on opening night in May 2022, Leiby told Business Insider. While she didn't need to worry about the contents of the message, Leiby nevertheless found it unnerving to receive an email sans subject line — especially from the doyen of fashion. "In a professional context, it's genuinely terrifying because the door is open for it to be anything," said Leiby, a comedian whose writing credits include the TV series "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel." It's been reported that Wintour, who recently said she would give up her role as editor in chief of the Americanfashion glossy to devote more time to other responsibilities at the magazine and its parent company, sometimes sends emails without subject lines. Despite Leiby's initial anxiety about the message, she later posted a screenshot of the email on social media, describing it as "the best email of my life." A representative for Vogue didn't respond to a request for comment from BI about the message to Leiby or Wintour's email practices. While leaving the subject line blank might work for some leaders —especially busy ones — workplace observers told BI that it's often a good idea to include one in business communications. Picking the right subject line Kathleen Schmidt, a publishing consultant in New York City, forces herself to add a subject line to most client emails she sends, even though she " hates" having to summarize a message with a title. "They're just impossible to come up with sometimes," Schmidt told BI. So, for less formal communications with colleagues, she'll often omit them. Schmidt sometimes does the same with friends or her husband — a practice that Schmidt said "drives him nuts." "It's from me. What do you think it's going to say? Like, 'We won a million dollars?'" Schmidt said. Thinking about your audience Barring a life-changing financial windfall, including a subject line for work communications is often beneficial because it can help people suss out what's most pressing, Lizzie Post, great-great-granddaughter of etiquette authority Emily Post and coauthor of the book "Emily Post's Business Etiquette," told BI. Those keywords can help people categorize a message and provide insights into its significance, she said. "It's really important, I think, for the vast majority of us," Post said. "But I'm also a Vogue devotee. I will not go against the queen." Kate Walker, a human resources consultant and executive coach in California, offered a similar assessment. Even though the summaries can be annoying, they have a purpose, Walker told BI. "When I'm writing a subject line, I need to think about my audience," she said. "We're competing for people's time." Leiby, the comedian, said that working as a performer and writer means she's grown accustomed to getting rejection emails. Even seeing an email from someone she'd interviewed with for a job can be nerve-racking, Leiby said. Yet, when a message arrives without a subject, "your heart stops for a minute," she said. "You're like, 'Oh, God, is this about to change my life in a good way or a bad way?'" Leiby said.
Business Insider
04-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Need to send a handwritten note? You can hire a robot to write it instead
Writing thank you notes might be one job plenty of people would be willing to let AI and robots take over. Turns out, they already are. The company Handwrytten deploys artificial intelligence to help customers whip up notes and then uses an army of robot scribes, gripping ballpoint pens, to write them. "The vast, vast, vast majority of the time, you'd never have an idea that it's written by a machine," David Wachs, founder and CEO of the Tempe, Arizona, company, told Business Insider. After all, we're in a moment in which tech boosters say our digital counterparts will soon free us from work, scrub clean our to-do lists, and wade deeper into our personal lives. Using technology to recreate the intimacy of a handwritten note also raises questions about authenticity, etiquette, and breaking through the everyday onslaught of emails, DMs, and text messages. "Everybody's getting so much electronic communication. What really stands out as old-fashioned communication," Wachs said. He founded Handwrytten in 2014 after leaving a text-messaging startup he'd launched a decade earlier. As he was departing that company, he wanted an easier way to send the handwritten goodbye notes he was drafting for employees and key clients because they would carry more weight than a digital message. Avoiding the 'uncanny valley' In order to make sure the letters don't look too perfect, Wachs said the robots vary letter shapes, line spacing, the left margin, and the strokes that join letters together. "We do all this stuff to try to create the most accurate human writing, without falling into that uncanny valley," Wachs said. Using robots that can write in nearly three dozen styles of penmanship — some of which carry alliterative names like Enthusiastic Erin and Slanty Steve — the company sends about 20,000 cards a day to customers or, more often, directly to the recipient. Most of Handwrytten's customers are businesses, though about 20% to 30% are individual consumers, Wachs said. Clients include companies hoping to engage with customers, recruiters looking to soften up executive prospects, and nonprofits that want to stay close to donors. Sales grew about 30% in 2024, Wachs said. In recent years, the company gave users the option of having AI write all or part of the messages. "Our slogan has always been 'Your words in pen and ink,' but half the time now it's not your words, it's ChatGPT," he said. What matters, Wachs said, is that the resulting note looks real to the recipient. He said that many people assume custom digital messages like emails and texts have been written with AI, which, Wachs said, then discounts their effectiveness. Does it count? As a tactile throwback, a letter written by a robot is real enough for many Handwrytten customers, Wachs said. While the intent of a letter meant to look handwritten might be genuine, Lizzie Post, great-great-granddaughter of protocol maven Emily Post and coauthor of the book "Emily Post's Business Etiquette," told BI she believes something is lost by using a robot. Post said a note that someone actually writes by hand is special, not because it shows effort on the part of the sender, but because a person's penmanship — even if it's imperfect — is unique to them and to a moment. "It makes that handwritten version that much more precious and amazing and special," Post said. Wachs said that critics have a point when they say part of writing a letter is to demonstrate that someone took the time to do it. Yet, he said, many people are simply too busy. "Often, the choice is not Handwrytten note or actual handwritten note. The choice is Handwrytten note or nothing," he said. Wachs, whose business relies on 55 workers and 185 robots, said that the results are convincing enough to help job seekers, business owners, marketers, and others distinguish themselves. "My wife will receive notes from her friends that use our service," Wachs said. "And she'll be like, 'Wow, they have beautiful handwriting."
CNBC
21-05-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Bosses like to complain about Gen Z in the workplace. This career expert thinks it's ‘BS'
New grads are entering the workforce, which means we're probably due for another conversation about how some bosses seem to despise Gen Z workers in the office. In recent years, CEOs have bemoaned that the youngest generation in the workforce, who are as old as 28 this year, don't want to work, are too casual, and are the most challenging generation to work with. Some leaders even go as far as saying they avoid hiring Gen Z workers. Alison Green, who explores all kinds of workplace conflicts through her Ask A Manager column read by millions, doesn't buy the Gen Z slander or that certain generations are "better" workers than others. "When millennials were the ones who were new to the workforce, they were getting so much crap about their bad work ethic, and that they all needed participation trophies. That was all BS," Green tells CNBC Make It. "I never encountered that in in real life, and I found that very annoying," she says. Young workers have always come into the professional world questioning the way things are done in an effort to understand current processes, innovate new ones and make work more accommodating, says Ziad Ahmed, a Gen Z work expert. "Every young generation has come into the world and workforce and asked hard questions to reimagine what the world can look like," Ahmed previously told Make It. That said, Green says the experience of graduating from college and starting a first job during the pandemic could have a meaningful impact on the way Gen Zers show up in a professional setting. Young workers may have missed out on developing crucial social and learning skills while going to school or completing internships virtually, Green says. It's not surprising that managers are seeing evidence of that and don't know how to manage young workers who have a different early-career experience from their own, she adds. "The headline really should be: 'People new to the workforce don't know about work,' but that's not an interesting headline," Green says. "They said it about millennials. They said it about Gen X. It's just a fact that when people are inexperienced, you're going to see they're inexperienced." Green believes the world and workplace changes caused by the pandemic "created a new level of challenge, but I'm not sure the problems themselves are brand new ones," she says. Some colleges have taken it upon themselves to better prepare young workers for the professional world, like by offering classes to practice making small talk, or boot camps to build career-readiness skills. Daniel Post Senning, who teaches workplace trainings and is the co-author of the "Emily Post's Business Etiquette" handbook, says requests for his services have skyrocketed in recent years as people return to office and young people start working for the first time. People of all generations can use reminders of how to be courteous, communicate effectively and pick up after themselves in a shared space, he says. Ultimately, Green says, it's important to view criticism about junior workers and consider: "Is it really a generational difference, or are you just complaining about young people?" ,
