Office memorandums or commonly known as memos are an effective way to communicate with employees and workers within the company whether it’s the same branch or different branches. An office memo is supposed to be short, precise, and brief. There are usually no formalities required i.e. attention to someone specific or addressing the reader with high respect but this is just a quick way to communicate something important to specific departments or employees in the company.
Types of Office Memos:
Common Business Memos:
This category can include a number of memos from reminder memos that have the purpose to remind something important to dress code memos that have the purpose to ask employees to dress properly to something like; change of policy memos that have the purpose to inform employees about the change in a company policy.
Field Report Memo:
It is not a very common type of office memo in businesses but in construction work, this is used very often but still, it can be used in any business or corporation. In simple words, a field report memo includes an inspection of a certain problem, the procedure of inspection, results, and conclusions. For instance, an employee complains about the low light problem in the office so the company will ask an inspector to evaluate and after he conducts the inspection, he will issue a field report memo to conclude his findings.
Confirmation Memo:
This is an official memo that is usually drafted after an important meeting. The basic purpose of this memo is to remind everyone about a commitment that is made by a superior or another employee. For instance, a project manager confirms during a meeting that he will finish the ongoing project within 2-3 weeks so the higher management will send out this confirmation memo to remind everyone that the project manager has given a certain timeframe to complete his project.
Request Memo:
This is a common type of office memo that is used in businesses on a daily or even hourly basis. Although when an employee wants to get approval from his supervisor, he needs to write an official request letter if the stuff is not very important, he can usually write a request memo and that’s what most employees use on regular basis. This memo is designed for day-to-day requests made from lower or middle-level employees to higher-level employees.
Suggestion Memo:
This is another very common type of office memo where a supervisor or senior management person asks the employees to give their suggestions to solve a problem or ideas to overcome an efficiency problem in the office. This is something that businesses and corporations use on daily basis to overcome delays and to include middle-level employees who understand the effects of a problem better.
Free Memo Templates
Check out these Free Office Memo Templates to assist you in preparing official office memos at your office quickly.
Professional Office Memo Guidelines
Here are some tips on writing a professional office memo:
Adding the Essentials of an Office Memo:
The first thing to do is to get the less important stuff out of the way. This includes the title “Memo” at the top of the document, the name of the sender, the name of the receivers, the names of people who will get a courtesy copy of the memo, and the date on which you are drafting the memo. These are the details that every office memo should have so once these are written, you can focus on the important part of the memo.
Adding a precise and brief Subject Line:
The thing that you need to understand about office memos is that these are written to be quick and efficient so if you are going to make it to 2 pages, it’s not a memo but an official letter. The one thing that makes it an office memo is that it’s short, it’s brief and it’s precise. You need to give the overall idea or purpose of the memo in 1 line at the top after putting the date. This subject line should be easy to understand by the readers and it should be short and include all necessary keywords that describe the memo itself.
Describe the issue in hand in First Paragraph:
The readers shouldn’t go through a series of paragraphs just to understand what the heck this memo is about. When you give the subject line that defines the purpose of the memo, immediately start writing about the purpose in the first paragraph. It doesn’t matter if you need to add 2 or even 3 paragraphs to cover the entire problem but the readers should be able to grab the idea from the start of the first paragraphs.
In the end, tell people what they should do:
An office memo is considered effective and perfect if it allows the readers to understand the problem that is being discussed in the memo and what they are supposed to do about it. For instance, if you are writing a memo about a change in dress policy, you should mention when people should start dressing according to the new policy i.e. immediately or from next month. In the same manner, if this memo is just to give an overview of a board meeting, you should mention that no actions are required at the end of the memo.
Every person at their workstation constantly reads memos very carefully while comprehending exactly what their message is conveying. That can be easy, however, if you are likely to create a memo, you really need to follow some writing principles to make it work; otherwise, you’ll end up writing a mess.
Memos, in the case of language, is a written proposal or note utilized in business interactions. Whether that be to recharge your team on an upcoming conference or to notify a customer about your moving distribution time, these are typically classic workplace documents that are mostly used for meeting calls.
Composing a memo doesn’t sound difficult at all. In reality, if you ask any person when they can compose one and they’ll probably offer a solution in the affirmative. Ask them to create one now, so later you could revise.
If you see yourself struggling when composing memos in the office, you can make use of this three-paragraph construction to create efficient types without too much fuss:
- Paragraph one begins with: “I am composing because…”
- Paragraph two starts with: “The facts are…”
- Paragraph three starts with: “I suggest you…”
While those three sentences sound simplistic, they are going to cover all the basics that a greater part of memos require to be able to convey your point. The very first point addresses your explanation behind writing, the text explains the current situation and the last informs the recipient of the way you wish things to be.
Use that format and you can actually be breezing through your memos in a brief fashion. Simply be certain to run it through an error-correction software to assist you in cleaning up any blunders.
