Lukewarm regards.
When I was 40, I went back to school to finish my degree. I graduated two years later, in 2021—20 years late and 1000% over budget. My degree was in project management.
However bad I was at finishing college, I was pretty good at being in it. So, when I learned that my university offered a paid-for subscription to the premium version of Grammarly, up I turned my nose. (That’s a grammar joke.)
One professor required the use of Grammarly. Being myself (i.e., drenched in privilege), I decided not to bother.
I got full marks on every single writing assignment and received no Grammarly-related pushback. But one of my classmates confided in me that she did use Grammarly, as instructed, and that she lost points on an assignment because the professor believed that she wasn’t using it. Worse, the examples highlighted to make this point were all suggested by Grammarly.
I felt vindicated. I didn’t believe Grammarly was a tool to make you a better writer, exactly; I thought it was a tool to make you a more standardized writer. My suspicion, correct or not, was that Grammarly could raise the floor for writers who struggled, but that using tools like it might also lower the ceiling for writers who didn’t.
A few years ago, I was the project manager on a pilot project with Exclaimer, a product for standardizing (read: controlling) the signatures of corporate email accounts. If your company uses Exclaimer, you will have a professional signature including your name, job title, contact information, and whatever corporate boilerplate and branding images your marketing department puts there. You don’t have control over your own signature block; Exclaimer automatically inserts it into your outgoing messages.
The company decided not to pursue the product for a variety of reasons (read: cost), but my stakeholders found it compelling: we could create a consistent, professional image in our communications with clients and partners. We could diminish reputational risk and avoid errors (because, as you know if you have ever worked in a large company, the information in Microsoft Active Directory is always correct).
Our Marketing team sometimes asked associates to add an email footer about a current promotion or upcoming event, but they were reliant on voluntary compliance to add these messages (and to remove them once they exceeded their shelf life). But now, Marketing could put whatever they wanted in everyone’s email signatures!
That turned me off, but what turned my stomach was a single five-minute discussion about one other detail of the signature block: with a pre-defined email signature, we could control the sign-off.
You know, the sign-off. The valediction. The closing salutation. The thing you type right before your name. “Sincerely” or “Yours” or “Best” or “Thanks” or the many, many regards. There are “Kind regards” and “Best regards” and plain “Regards.” And, of course, “Warm regards.” As someone named Tom opined on Mastodon, warm regards feel gross. (“Why are they warm?”) I’ve seen both “Warm regards” and “Warmest regards.” Surely someone must be sending “Warmer regards.”
Regardless, whether you sign off with a terse “Best” or a wordy “All the best,” or you Goldilocks it like I do and say, “Best wishes,” how you sign off your email is up to you. The moment we started talking about taking that one little bit of professional personality away was the moment when I turned against the project. I went from an engaged advocate to a dispassionate facilitator. I was glad when the actual decision-makers gave Exclaimer their regards.
Another example: an organization I worked with that considered paying for more advanced Microsoft Teams licenses so they could control employees’ virtual backdrops on video calls. Just think—no more wild inconsistency over which virtual backdrop someone has, no people wandering through open-plan offices in the background, no messy or tasteless work-from-home situations caught on camera. It will be great! Professional! Consistent!
As with Grammarly, though, this is not merely raising the level of everyone’s presentation, but leveling it. Someone’s neat and well-lit home office (or office office) would make a fine backdrop. Most people have good taste in virtual backdrops for work calls. The ones who don’t add a level of humanity and fun to the discussions. And have you ever been on a call with a company that enforces “professional” branded backdrops? Everyone looks like they are standing in the same position in the same room. Which is inevitably a view of a tasteful wall with the company logo on it. They look like they’re taking the call from their office lobby! Professional? I guess. More so than what everyone was doing before? Doubtful.
Which brings us back around to the bête noire of the first two issues of Overmorrow: AI. (You may take a drink.) I recently heard a manager admonishing their team to run everything through Copilot, for the sake of professionalism, clarity, and eliminating mistakes. Even if we can accept that it does that, though, is that what we want? Large language models are, essentially, a statistical average of all the text on the internet. Their output is, by definition, a kind of average. With the right tuning and prompting, they may even produce something above average, but they are fundamentally a conservative technology. They won’t do something great.
Grammarly smooths out your writing, Exclaimer smooths out your email signature, Teams Premium smooths out your video call background, and GitHub Copilot smooths out your code. But smooth isn’t the same as professional. And it is the opposite of innovative, creative, human, warm.
Professionalism no longer means “As white, as male, and as wearing-a-suit as possible.” But our rush to use technology to standardize our output and our presentation risks erecting similarly stifling boundaries. While these tools can help everyone avoid projecting the wrong image, that isn’t the same as projecting the right image. Enforcing a bland, sanitized sameness on everyone might save you from your sloppiest employees, but it will also save you from your superstars.
