Do Your Employees Know How To Use E-Mail?

Do your employees know how to use email in a business environment? The rise in technology has put most people onto email channels for communication.

In this article, we are trying to see if it is working for company productivity and if not what can be done to make it a useful tool.

Do you find your mailbox flooded?
Why the need for unnecessary emails?
Why business emails are failing their purpose?
Can email communication be more useful?
Email etiquette for business and how it would help communication
Should all employees have access to email?
Do your employees know how to use email? - Summary

Do you find your mailbox flooded?

It is not uncommon these days to arrive at work and find your mailbox flooded with emails of which most are unwanted or unusable.

The time you have to spend sifting through these emails can be annoying to say the most. It makes you wonder if all employees know how to use their email correctly

This can have a serious effect on your productivity and time management for the day ahead.

Why the need for unnecessary emails?

Since the early 90s communication by means of email became more popular in the workplace.

Today there are many arguments regarding the correct usage and the benefits of internal e-mails in organizations.

In the beginning, it was an efficient way for management to communicate urgent matters to all the departments in a very short time.

With the growth of access to e-mail and the development of social media, the usefulness of internal emails was lost forever.

Organizations failed to recognize the importance of training staff on the correct use of email communication.

Hundreds of other policies and guidelines are in place around every corridor and corner of an organization but few guidelines on email communication.

The reason for this is that top management themselves converted a once useful communication tool into an instruction instrument.

Studies conducted on communication within most top companies show that as much as 80% of internal emails serve no purpose but to forward useless information around.

As much as 94% of emails require no feedback, therefore, we can say that e-mail communication carries no value.

The 6% that carries value will normally only reach a few of the staff inside the organization, therefore, rendering it useless unless it is person-specific.

Why business emails are failing their purpose

Most staff is excluded from communication that can make a difference in organizational culture.

What is going on in the organization is no longer shared by open communication and it has a negative effect on organizational culture.

The user's usage of social media also changed the manner of communication and emails are no different.

Where in the past email information was constructive and informative it has changed to a reduced version of what true communication is about.

Wording and sentences are shortened to compensate for time and the message is lost. It is also common to include people who can have no productive contribution to the outcome for the sake of letting others know that you are "busy".

Can email communication be more useful?

How to change this we ask? It is difficult to undo this trend with the same people that started it. It is like any other bad habit that is enjoyable even if it is bad for your health.

Organizations that achieved more success in extracting value from internal emails are companies that:

Train staff on e-mail etiquette

Explain in guidelines what type of emails carry value

Clearly define who gets what information in their email

Distributes an internal weekly newsletter containing matters related to the organization's culture and well-being to everyone via email.

Make sure hard copies are placed on all notice boards

Having an email usage policy in place with guidelines on how to construct an email and how to ensure that it sticks to the outcome required is a useful instrument in your channel.

Email Etiquette for business and how it would help communication

Email etiquette for business can be streamlined through your internal policies and guidelines. This will set standards and best practices for all employees to follow and ensure uniformity in how people communicate in your organization.

The benefits of having email etiquette guidelines in place are:

Standardized email formats
Clear communication
Professional Conduct
Limitation on unnecessary emails
Adherence to government legislation
Defining communication channels

Ensuring conforming to a predefined email etiquette is the responsibility of your Human Resources and IT Departments but the enforcement will always be the leader who must lead by example.

Being the leader does not entitle you to spam other workers' mailboxes with trivial matters as it has a negative eff ect on your te a m 's pr oductivity

Should all employees have access to email?

This has become a very debatable point and there is no real answer to it. This is where leadership and management need to step up and put rules in place. Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where a normal person cannot work without strict guidelines.

My personal advice is that not all employees should have access to email and those that do should be bound to strict guidelines. This is even more important now than before because of the new laws on privacy protection that most countries adopted.

Only key personnel who are in charge of teams should have access to email but only if they have key reporting to be done. Too many top managers have turned email into social media chat groups because they are not competent in direct communication.

Some people are just lazy or find passing on "problems" via email is easier. The first sign of poor leadership is the failure of effective direct communication.