Internal emails: If the story's bad, memo's the word

Next time you receive an email that's being sent to everyone in the company, grit your teeth before opening it. It might be an innocent circular about canteen prices, but in these markets, it could be much worse.

If you work anywhere near Americans, be particularly nervous about phrases like "major workforce adjustment", "employee transitioning", or IBM's favoured choice of "workforce rebalancing". Also beware the sort of mail going round firms like Beatnik.com, where the founder quit with the line, "I am leaving Beatnik at a time when the business has never been stronger" – before explaining the exact state the company was in.

Internal email memos from management are now the standard way of getting lots of bad news to lots of people at once. Some say they're cowardly, others that they're pointless. Either way, the memos are shaping up as the defining legacy of the bear market. It is with this in mind that the dot-com doom-mongers of Fuckedcompany.com have set up a sister website to chronicle the horrors of modern memos.

There is one from Kinko's, whose panicky subject-line reads "Don't destroy company records", and one from SBC Prodigy that heralds the withdrawal of free snacks in the lounge. Another gem is the bitter internal memo from Jean-Marie Messier on the day of his forced resignation from media giant Vivendi Universal. His sign-off was to encourage people to write to him at his AOL email address.

There are numerous approaches to the art of writing memos – some refined, some less so. A memo from Hewlett-Packard that ended "Gather your personal property and remove from HP premises" had the creepy opening: "If you have received this message, this directive applies to you."

Some companies like a good news/bad news approach, but one tactic that is turning into a modern classic is to open the memo with grim commentary on the current state of the market before unleashing the lay-off news. In many cases, such as an email from Sprint that heralds the cutting of 1,200 jobs, the bad news only comes after pages of gloomy padding.

In general, the more excessive the language, the better. "We continue to face what may be the most adverse macroeconomic environment in the history of the information technology industry," wrote the chief executive of Siebel Systems, before listing the number of industry bankruptcies so far this year and reporting that "this is not a happy day".

At EDS, the chief executive described this as "one of the most challenging periods in US corporate history" before closing with a rousing call to "Action, urgency, excellence!".

Others have had to resort to clumsy metaphors. "As summer heats up, in the northern hemisphere at least, the US and global economies remain cool," began a long memo to all employees of Autodesk that finished by saying: "We are $1m better off if every employee takes and claims just one vacation day."

Describing similar things, one Lucent memo used the word "firestorm", while the bosses of E.piphany said they knew how hard it was to "keep pushing the boulder uphill". One from Verio, an internet division of NTT, was even more graphic: "The industry drought continues, the rains are yet to come, and we must continue to manage our business in these extreme desert conditions." By the end of the memo, the company was begging its staff for ideas to get it out of trouble.

Many internal memos seem designed to create confusion. The WorldCom collapse has produced many dire memos but one stands out. "As you may be aware, there are no longer any administrative personnel to assist in daily and routine tasks," began the memo to employees. The email went on to give a web address which "documents how you may self-service items in many of the areas you once supported".

In a failed effort to calm things down, Excite sent a short email to its staff urging them to be nice to each other. "We are making selected personnel changes and inevitably there will be disappointments."

Efforts to cheer things up at Nortel bordered on the absurd: "To show your team spirit, wear your company's apparel proudly. Dig out those T-shirts, baseball caps and anything else you've got with a logo. The older, the bolder, the better."

The most recent oddity was a paradoxical internal email sent to all at Monday, the group that used to be PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting. "We have been on a journey for the last two years to enable the PwC consulting business to achieve independence. Today we are pleased to announce that PricewaterhouseCoopers has signed a definitive purchase agreement with IBM."

But before you forward your next internal memo to Fuckedcompany.com, the people in your IT department may have beaten you to it. Cnet has blocked the site from all employees, and American Airlines has taken the precaution of sending all internal memos in hard copy.