Brett Barton
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Have we lost the art of written communication?
15th July 2010 08:42
As a leading insolvency practitioner providing insolvency advice to businesses and individuals based in Coventry and the surrounding area, I decided to take an active part in the evolvement of the insolvency sector and joined a committee within the Insolvency Practitioners Association (“IPA”). The IPA regulates IP’s around the country and ensures that they meet the appropriate standard.
Having attended a few meetings, it is clear that whilst some complaints that arise against IP’s stem from a lack of insolvency knowledge by the general public, the majority arise due to the poor quality of correspondence from the IP’s office.
When I first started out in my working life I remember typing a telex to India, sending out purchase orders that I had typed on a typewriter and researching items on a microfiche reader. That was only 18 years ago! It is now common place for international trade to occur via email, skype or video conferencing.
The Insolvency Act was recently changed to allow for the future development of technology and it is envisaged that reports, circulars will be sent or available electronically and creditors meetings will be conducted as virtual meetings.
I am all for change and making the insolvency processes more straightforward for people to access and understand but at what cost? When you quickly respond or send an email, you do not print it out and check it, some people do not even spell check them, they are often in fone txt spk, it may not go to another person for a cold review, it doesn’t bear the company logo and potentially it could be a ticking time bomb. Do you have any control over the emails that are sent by your staff? Are you sure that with important issues you want to correspond by emails which will be admissible in Court?
I guess this is the source of my frustration, if people took a little more time to consider how to communicate with people more effectively, a number of the conflicts which I come across would never exist.
