Making E-mail Work for the Team

By Heather C. Conover
Conover + Company Communications

Finding time to manage work, family, and leisure activity is a huge challenge for most of us. Increasingly one of our time management tools is actually further burdening our time-challenged lives. E-mails, the widely accepted standard method of office communication, has not only left inter- and intra-office verbal dialog a less frequent form of communication, it has also made us less efficient with our time. In a recent National Public Radio “Morning Edition” interview, Marilyn Paul, a business consultant and author, commented that people are spending many hours everyday reading, answering, and organizing the deluge of work-related e-mail. She described a personal incident where someone sent a detailed e-mail that obviously took a long time to compose when a three minute phone call would not only have sufficed, but also would have been a better avenue to raise and quickly resolve the issue. She offered some helpful suggestions for managing e-mail at the workplace so that they regain their usefulness as a business tool and do not disrupt workflow.

First, Paul says, e-mail should be a secondary tool for communicating with coworkers, clients, vendors, and other work associates. It should also work for the company or team. Together a department or team should review the office e-mail system, pinpointing what works, what doesn’t work and why it doesn’t work. Recommendations on how to improve e-mail should be made, agreement reached, a trial period implemented, and results discussed as a group after one week. This process should be repeated until e-mail is again an effective and efficient tool for the team.

Shorter e-mails are better, states Paul. E-mails should be no longer than one to ten sentences in length. A longer message should be attached in a document or discussed on the phone or in a face-to-face meeting. Long e-mails leave room for what Paul describes as “circles of conversations in round after round of e-mail.” Paul also recommends that after two rounds of attempting problem solving via e-mail, a phone call or face-to-face conversation is in order.

E-mails are time consuming not only to read and answer, but also to open. Subject line protocols can expedite the e-mail process, says Paul, and help both the sender and the recipient speed the e-mail process. Messages in the subject line, such as No reply needed –NRN or Need a response by – NRB both save time and avoid the clutter of unnecessary responses. In addition, entire e-mail messages, such as “Meet 2/14 11:00 Okay? END” can be entered in the subject line. These alert the recipient that only the subject line needs to be read and the e-mail message doesn’t have to be opened.

Spring 2005 -Volume 15, Number 2

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