How to Write a Good Complaint Email to Your Manager

It’s a tough spot to be in when things aren’t going well at work for reasons outside your control, or for reasons you just don’t know how to fix. Maybe it’s another employee, maybe it’s burnout. A lot of people avoid raising these problems with their manager because they think it puts their job at risk. The opposite is usually true. Managers want to know what’s going on so they can help.

Writing a good email about bad things is hard, so here’s the template I use for a complaint email that gets you the result you want while keeping your professionalism intact.

The five-part complaint email template

1. State the problem.
2. Explain how you feel about the problem.
3. Explain how you’ve tried to solve the problem.
4. Ask for help, and offer your own ideas for solving it.
5. State what you hope will happen, and what success looks like.

An example complaint email

Say you manage accounts for a company. Something changes and suddenly you have three times as many accounts. A job that was manageable becomes unbearable, you’re barely sleeping, and you’re on the verge of burnout.

State the problem.

Dear Manager,

In the latest restructure I ended up with three times the number of accounts to manage, and I’m working ten and twelve hour days and losing sleep. I’m extremely stressed and frustrated, and I’m falling behind to the point where tasks aren’t getting done and I’m letting down my co-workers.

How you feel about the problem.

Being unable to keep up with my work makes me feel awful and defeated, and I’m worried it will damage my relationships with my co-workers.

How you’ve tried to solve the problem.

I’ve tried posting my daily to-do list in the standup channel in Slack, but it hasn’t made a difference.

Ask for help, and offer ideas.

Could you help me find a solution? I have a few ideas: (1) moving some accounts off my desk, (2) building an interface so stakeholders can track statuses without emailing or Slacking me for updates, and (3) getting an assistant to help me process certain items.

What you want to happen, and what success looks like.

My goal is to make my job manageable so I don’t burn out, and to make sure I continue to be seen as reliable by my co-workers.

Why this structure works

This template scales to almost any level of severity, and a few things about its construction matter.

The biggest one is that you’re coming to the table with solutions, not just problems. Managers have a lot of people to manage, and their job is to solve problems and make their team successful. Employees who don’t participate in solving their own problems generally don’t get considered for a management track, and at the extreme end they can be treated as a nuisance when they surface too many problems, even warranted ones.

So what do you do if you don’t know how to solve the problem? Ask mentors or peers for advice first. If that isn’t available and you genuinely don’t know what to do, be candid: say you’ve tried to come up with solutions and you’re unsure. Telling your manager what you’ve already tried matters, and good managers read that vulnerability as a strength. It also builds trust and rapport, which is a good way to build a real relationship with the people who can affect your career.

What happens after you send it

Usually your manager will set up a meeting to discuss the complaint. Avoid blaming statements like “you” and “they” when you explain the situation, because that creates an us-versus-them dynamic. What you want is a collaborative space where it’s us versus the problem. Explain things in terms of how you experienced them. People are more sympathetic to feedback when they can see you’re not assigning blame. You attract more flies with honey than with vinegar.

One last thing about the closing section, the part where you say what you want to happen. It isn’t a list of demands. It helps your manager see what you think success looks like once the problem is solved, and it gives you both a measure for evaluating whatever solution you put in place.

Hopefully this gives you a clear path forward, and helps you turn a tough situation into a better one.