BLUF: THE method for better and effective written communication
How we can better communicate remotely. Hint: better writing.
Communication in remote work is all about written communication. That’s the big shift that happened regarding how we communicate. The Economist and Information Week are two examples of many explaining the shift.
Amongst the methods available to learn about how to better communicate remotely, BLUF has been my favourite — very close to the TL;DR method. BLUF is a military communication method that means Bottom Line Up Front — aka just say what you want/need up front and THEN give context.
Here you will find more about it and examples of it!
Whenever you Google tips to work remotely, you find countless resources mentioning communication as a core skill. On top of that, a lot of the content mentions OVER COMMUNICATION as the best way to do it.
The problem with that concept is that many people don't understand what it means. For example, let's say your manager asks you about a report. In an over-communication environment, the conversation over Slack could go this way:
- Did you do the report?
- Sure, I reviewed the tracking tools, had a call with the ops team and took the right time to analyze it all. After careful revisions, the report is done.
For sure, a lot of contexts, but the question is a pretty standard yes/no question. There is no need to add context unless it's requested. Especially over Slack.
So.
It’s not about OVER communicating. It’s about BETTER communicating. And one of the things I learned along the way to better communicate is the BLUF method.
Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF)
Military professionals use BLUF to send over-written messages, mostly emails. It declares the decision/question right away, and THEN explains the background and context that supports it.
The BLUF should quickly answer the five W’s: who, what, where, when, and why. An effective BLUF distills the most important information for the reader. (Sehgal, 2016)
That's because the reader doesn't necessarily want to know the whole context, but they NEED to know the decision/information.
BLUF Examples
Let's say you want to tell your boss that you finished your performance report for Q2. You can send this over Slack:
I finished my performance report for Q2. Can we have a 1:1 about it?
I've increased the number of cold calls by 15%, and I exceeded my goal by 20%. I noticed that my conversion rate decreased by 10%. I'm thinking about a few strategies for Q3 and I'd like to know your feedback and ideas about them.
And here is another one:
Shannon,
Bottom Line: We will reduce the number of days that employees can work from home from three to one day per week effective December 1st.
Background:
This is an effort to encourage team morale and foster team collaboration
All members of the management committee supported this decision (Sehgal, 2016)
Finally, this one shows the difference between not using BLUF and using it:
Jim,
Over the course of working on the new project, we’ve encountered some challenges working with the data. When we try to take table A from Database 1 and load it into Database 2, we are getting an error. So far, we’ve tried a few methods we found online here and here but nothing seems to work. Do you have any experience with this type of data transfer? If not do you know anyone else that has experience converting Oracle data to SQL Server?
As the example reflected, the sender’s query came to an end. Further, no information on what kind of error and even gave several links to the receiver instead of elaborating the methods and put a technical detail after asking for help.
Let us compare it to the BLUF email version below:
Jim,
Do you know who can help us convert Oracle data to SQL Server? This is for a new project and we’ve encountered some challenges… (Wikipedia)
Special thanks to Joe Chan, who told me about this method. It completely changed the way I see written communication and I couldn’t be more thankful!
This content was part of a workshop about Remote Work that I hosted on August 25th, 2022. Here is the full slide deck with this and more resources.
