Greetings and Closings in Workplace Email
Joan Waldvogel
Centre for Social Research and Evaluation
Ministry of Social Development, Wellington
This article reports on a study of the use and form of greetings and closings in the
emails of two New Zealand workplaces: an educational organization and a manufactur-
ing plant. Using discourse analytic techniques, 515 emails were analyzed and a number
of differences were identified. In the educational organization, where restructuring has
resulted in low staff morale and a mistrust of management, indirect and socially dis-
tant styles of communication prevailed and greetings and closings were not widely used.
In the manufacturing plant, the more extensive use of greetings and closings reflected
and constructed the open and positive relationships between staff and management and
the direct, friendly, and familial workplace culture. The findings suggest that workplace
culture is a more important factor accounting for the frequency and form of greetings
and closings than are relative status, social distance, and gender.
doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00333.x
Introduction
The closing years of the 20th century saw the introduction and widespread adoption
of email as a means of workplace communication. Email is now a fact of life in many
workplaces, where it has largely replaced written memos and much telephone and
face-to-face interaction. In some workplaces in the corporate world, email has
become the primarycommunication medium, and many of today’s workplaces could
no longer function without it. It plays an important role in the transmission
of information and, in general, in dealing with everyday administrivia at work
(Waldvogel, 2005). The main advantage of email over other modes of communica-
tion is that it enables people to communicate speedily the same information to many
others in diverse locations and time zones. It is also valued because it provides an
audit trail and record of the communication.
Interestingly, greetings and closings perform as important a social role in email
as in other forms of interactions. As Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2003) note:
‘‘Greetings and farewells offer formulas to ease the strain created for face by the
beginnings and ends of interactions’’ (p. 138). The absence or presence of a greeting
and the type of greeting set the tone for the email conversation that follows. The
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
456 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12 (2007) 456–477 ª 2007 International Communication Association