Email Assignment

Email Skills 10-40

Message Strategies: Making Routine Negative Announcements [LO-5] You’ve been proud of many things your gardening tool company has accomplished as it grew from just you working in your basement shop to a nationally known company that employs more than 200 people. However, nothing made you prouder than the company’s Helping Our Hometown Grow program, in which employees volunteer on company time to help residents in your city start their own vegetable gardens, using tools donated by the company. Nearly 50 employees participated directly, helping some 500 families supplement their grocery budgets with homegrown produce. Virtually everyone in the company contributed, though, because employees who didn’t volunteer to help in the gardens pitched in to cover the work responsibilities of the volunteers. Sadly, 10 years after you launched the program, you have reached the inescapable conclusion that the company can no longer afford to keep the program going. With consumers around the country still struggling with the aftereffects of a deep recession, sales have been dropping for the past three years—even as lower-cost competitors step up their presence in the market. To save the program, you would have to lay off several employees, but your employees come first. Your task: Write an email to the entire company, announcing the cancellation of the program.

Email Skills

11-44. Message Strategies: Requests for Action [LO-2] You appreciate how important phones are to your company’s operations, but the amount of conversational chatter in your work area has gotten so bad that it’s hard to concentrate on your work. You desperately need at least a few quiet hours every day to engage in the analytical thinking your job requires.

Your task: Write an email message to the division vice president, Jeri Ross, asking her to designate one of the conference rooms as a quiet-zone work room. It would have Wi-Fi so that employees can stay connected to the corporate network, but it would not have any phone service, either landline or mobile. (Mobile reception is already weak in the conference rooms, but you will propose to equip the room with a mobile signal jammer to ensure that no calls can be made or received.) In addition, conversation of any kind would be strictly forbidden. Make up any details you need.