Clean Air Committee Requests Carpooling As the new chairperson for your company's Clean Air committee, one of your responsibilities is to encourage employees to form car pools. In the past, employees have resisted forming car pools for a number of

Question

reasons, including the lack of an organized program, the complexity of flextime schedules, and the extra time needed to pick people up. Your company has agreed to provide privileged parking spaces to car pool participants but will not provide any monetary incentives. Required: Write a persuasive memo or email to all employees encouraging them to form carpools. You may add any terms of persuasion necessary to influence them to participate.

Answer 1

When writing the persuasive memo or email, the steps that should be followed are given below:
a) Write a subject line that specifically mentions the topic of the message.
b) Write the message inductively, beginning with a short, attention-getting paragraph. You might use a little-known fact about air pollution or a recent news story focusing on the need for cleaner air.
c) Build interest in the car pool program by presenting benefits the employees can gain through participation. Most of the incentives are intrinsic (helping the environment).
d) Address the major resistance to the program, including the past lack of an organized program, the flextime schedules, and extra time needed to pick people up. Overcome each issue through logical discussion.
e) Ask employees to take specific action, such as filling in their names and addresses in a card to "match" them with car pool partners.
f) Make sure grammar, spelling, and punctuation are perfect.
A proposed solution follows:

To: All Employees
Subject: Cleaner Air with Car Pools

You cannot choose the air you breathe, and you need enormous amounts of it — 26,000 breaths daily. That adds up to about 150 bathtubs full of air each day. While air quality has improved in the past decade, according to the Foundation for Clean Air, even small amounts of air pollution can have bad health effects on people. The negative health effects can range from triggering or worsening of asthma to eye, throat, and lung irritations and respiratory diseases.

Our company wants citizens of this city to breathe clean air. By joining a car pool, you can help improve the quality of the air you breathe. Your efforts may even improve the health problems of your family and friends that may be triggered by poor air quality. The program is tailored to make carpooling easy. We match you with people in your area and allow flexible work schedules to help make the logistics of carpooling easier. In addition to contributing to cleaner air, you can avoid the stress of driving daily in rush hour.

Let us match you up with others who want to carpool. Simply fill in the lines below with your name and address, and check off the geographic area that you live in. Respond to this email by Friday and we will get back to you next week with the specific details. You will soon have a carpool partner to share your daily commute to the office. Together, all of us can help contribute to cleaner air for our city.