Hey there, I'm Devin!
Most of the time you can catch me deep in the world of internal comms at Workshop (yes, the Happy Mondays folks!), and while I love AI, there are just some comms questions that need a human who really gets it… that’s me!
Hi Devin,
I always struggle with how long my emails should be. Leaders want context, employees want brevity, and complex topics don’t fit neatly into three bullet points. How do you decide what to include and what to cut?
Obviously, I’m a big fan of email, but I’ll also be the first to say that email can’t solve every problem. When leaders want depth and context, but employees want something quick they can skim between meetings, you’re kind of stuck. That’s usually a good signal that no single channel is going to make everyone happy on its own.
When that happens, my advice is to zoom out and look at your full channel stack. Are you using email, Slack or Teams, and an intranet? Have you considered other formats, like an internal podcast? When you intentionally decide which channels are best for depth and which are best for brevity, you can start to train both employees and leaders on where different types of content should live.
I know I’ve talked a lot about my experience at Workshop, but our internal podcast is a great example of this in practice. It’s become the home for long, in-depth updates from our founders. We host a monthly founder chat where our founders get on the mic for about 45 minutes, sharing deeper insights on how we’re pacing toward our goals, what’s coming up, wins we’ve had, and lessons learned. All of that context used to live in email, and it just wasn’t working.
Now, instead of forcing that depth into an inbox, we distribute the podcast with a short, high-level recap email. That email focuses on key takeaways and points people to the full conversation if they want to go deeper. I also use AI to help with this by pulling the audio transcript and asking it to surface the most important points, which saves a ton of time and keeps the summary focused.
So while this might feel like a roundabout answer, the takeaway is pretty simple: deciding how long an email should be is really about deciding what role email plays in your broader comms ecosystem. Email is great for highlights, context-setting, and calls to action. Other channels can (and should) carry the weight of deeper explanations.
And most importantly, no message has to live in just one place. Meeting busy employees where they are usually means repeating and redistributing the same information across channels, not cramming everything into one message and hoping it sticks.
