Turning the ordinary email greeting into a medium for empathy

How many times have you seen that line in an email this year and thought, “Well, no, this email does not find me well — I’m terrible, thanks.” None of us are well! There’s still a deadly virus raging across the country, more than 1,000 people are dying every day, millions of people have lost their jobs, unemployment benefits are precarious, it’s still impossible to predict what the economy will do or when it will do it, we don’t really have social lives, culture is mostly still on pause, we don’t know when a vaccine will come … things are bleak! And pretending otherwise in an email isn’t helping.

And yet: Emails, those daily incursions no one likes but no one can avoid, are still a core part of our personal and professional lives. They must still be written and read, whatever is happening around us. So how do we write them without sounding tone deaf or misguidedly optimistic? “It’s so hard, and it has evolved,” said Liz Fosslien, an author of “No Hard Feelings,” which examines how emotions affect our work lives. “When the pandemic first hit, it felt so crazy, because there were deadlines that still needed to be met, so you were emailing people,” Ms. Fosslien said, “like, ‘Hello, hope everything is OK given that the world is crumbling to pieces. Do you have that paper I needed?’” The email greeting, no one’s favourite thing to write even in the Before Times, has been exposed by the pandemic for its stodgy emptiness; a hollow, yet necessary, formality. But now we’re forced to consider what we’re actually saying when we’re really not saying much. Poking fun at those old greetings — “Hope you’ve been well!” “Just wanted to check in!” “Good to be in touch!” — has become its own form of coping as we reach for any bit of levity in such grim times, experts said. “What this experience has shown me is that we have leaned on the generic, surface-level greetings for too long,” said Elaine Swann, a lifestyle and etiquette expert. “That has probably, in some instances, harmed our relationships and our dealings with people. So I think one of the things we can learn from this moment is to have transparency and to share your personal truth, or to dig a little deeper and acknowledge that things are not going well.” On Twitter last week, I asked how people had adapted their email greetings and signoffs to the current state of things. The responses generally broke down into a few categories: genuine empathy, maximum inoffensiveness or gallows humour.

Jokes aside, what is truly appropriate for right now? How can we write an email and be casual without seeming inauthentic, or be personal without seeming smarmy? Should we try out a little humour, even though, for so many people, there is no humour to be found right now? According to Fosslien, a lot of that depends on your recipient.

“People in different countries, let alone in different states, they’re facing different realities,” she said, pointing out, for example, the situation in New Zealand as opposed to the one in the United States. “If you’re emailing someone there, it doesn’t make sense to say, ‘Hope you’re staying inside.’”

Swann suggested we try observing what she calls the three core standards of proper etiquette and protocol: respect, honesty and consideration. “People are really being impacted by everything from Covid to the civil unrest we’re experiencing,” she said. “So we cannot just go about business as usual. We have to show our human side.”

Swann recommends that, rather than try to glaze over the context in which we’re all living and the struggles that come with it, we should lean in to being honest about what we’re going through. That vulnerability, she said, serves many purposes: It can deepen the connections with the people in your life; it can help your co-workers better understand problems you might be dealing with; and it can help us all buck the “just push through it” attitude that some workplaces have accepted as normal.