Memos: still relevant today?

by Lee Hopkins on October 4, 2005 · View Comments

in Uncategorized

G'day! Thanks for returning!

memorandums - have they disappeared?I’m putting together a training course for a client on business writing and one of the areas they have asked me to address is ‘memos’.

I haven’t worked in a client company that has used them for ages, so I wondered if they had been replaced or simply disappeared without a trace?

Are paper-based memorandums still relevant today?

Have they been replaced by corporate email systems and/or intranets?

Is there any benefit to keeping a memorandum style – perhaps for two or three page proposals for funding to develop new products and services?

What do you think?

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  • Lee, my experience is that memos are fading away in favor of the "broadcast" e-mail that is also posted onto an intranet site. The only exception I have seen is where certain groups of workers have limited e-mail access (such as manufacturing or food services) where that broadcast e-mail gets printed out and posted to a noticeboard in a similar fashion to the memos of old.

    I have seen people circulating PDFs as Donna has, primarily in cases where they want to "lock" the contents in a format that cannot be easily altered.

    Best wishes with the training,
    Dan
  • Good question, Lee. Some of my clients see to be emulating the old paper memo with a similar-looking email attachment. In other words, they'll have the "memo" "typed" in Word and then usually made into a PDF file that is emailed to the pertinent people. The PDF file is usuallly posted to the intranet as well. I honestly don't know of anyone using paper memos, but Heidi's example is a good one -- where people are looking for an old-fashioned paper trail.

    Good luck with the training!
  • I do work for a client who stil uses memos on rare occasion. Now, granted, this person in particular happens to be much more comfortable with paper, but I've noticed that the memos tend to be used only for very short, important notices for which an internal paper trail is important. For example, on the rare occasion when a customer has a substantial complaint, a memo with the appropriate people cc'd might be distributed and then filed, just in case there is every any question about the immediacy of his action.

    But then, he is a lawyer. :-)

    Email is used for just about everything else. And yes, I'm aware that one could print out an email just as easily as a memo, but I suspect there is something about the fact that it says "memo" at the top that makes it somehow more credible than an email that comes into the same inbox with all the Viagara spam.
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