3 ways to fold humor and humanity into your work emails

Today’s average employee spends close to 30 percent of their work hours on email and receives 120 messages per day. A recent study conducted by Slack showed that 62 percent of their users spend over three hours of their work day in Slack, and another study found that 91 percent of businesses use two or more messaging apps simultaneously.

But digital correspondence doesn’t need to be soul-sucking. Instead, think of them as bite-sized opportunities to invite genuine connection with your coworkers and partners. Even a touch of levity can start a chain reaction that shifts the dynamic.

A callback references a shared experience between you and the recipient, transforming a single moment into an inside joke.

Callbacks are particularly powerful because they make it easy for the other person to reply in kind. 

Calling back a shared moment of any kind usually does the trick — but calling back a moment when you and the recipient laughed together, as Daria did, is particularly powerful.