Comments on: Memos: still relevant today?

By: Lee’s new Better Communication Results blog

Lee’s new Better Communication Results blog — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 22:18:21 +0000

[...] Long-time readers of this blog will remember that I once asked if the memo had gone to a better land, a land where memos were revered, respected and lived a very memo-centric lifestyle. [...]

By: Dan York

Dan York — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 11:56:11 +0000

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

By: donna papacosta

donna papacosta — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 23:34:14 +0000

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!

By: Heidi Miller

Heidi Miller — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 19:25:38 +0000

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.