Writing to teams
Messages for your team: 3 examples across 1 occasions
Messages to a team usually thank everyone for their hard work, which is the corporate equivalent of saying nothing.
What makes a team message land is naming what this particular group did, in what particular circumstances, and what it cost.
Specific beats effusive, and evidence beats adjectives, especially with a group that can compare notes afterwards.
Pick the occasion
step 01 · nine templates
Every occasion, written for your team
The details worth reaching for
Whatever the occasion, these are the specifics that make a message to your team sound like it came from someone who was actually paying attention.
- The specific thing this group got through
- A moment when the team could have dropped it and did not
- What the group is unusually good at
- How people covered for each other
- The standard this team holds that others do not
- Something that went wrong and how it was handled
- A quiet contributor everyone relies on
- What has changed about the team this year
Every stop holds a moment
the path they walk
What goes wrong when people write to teams
Thanking everyone for their hard work
The most common sentence in workplace communication and the least informative.
Only naming the visible people
Teams notice immediately who was left out.
Praise that is really about results
Name the behaviour, not just the number.
Openings and sign-offs that fit this relationship
Ways to open
- “What this team did this year…”
- “Most groups would have dropped this…”
- “The thing about working with this team…”
- “I want to name something specific…”
- “Not the numbers - the way you got there…”
Ways to close
- “Genuinely proud of this group”
- “Thank you, all of you”
- “Here is to the next one”
- “Good work. Really”
- “It was the team, not the plan”
Common questions
- What should you write to your team?
- Messages to a team usually thank everyone for their hard work, which is the corporate equivalent of saying nothing.. The message that lands names one specific thing rather than summarising the relationship.
- What should you avoid writing to your team?
- Thanking everyone for their hard work. The most common sentence in workplace communication and the least informative.
- How do you make a message to your team sound personal?
- Replace one general phrase with something only you would know - the specific thing this group got through, for instance. That single substitution is what separates a borrowed message from one that sounds like you.
Make it something your team opens
The same details, turned into a private interactive world. Free to build and preview.