IT Management Reference Guide

Young managers today may wonder how did offices ever communicate before the age of emails? Old-timers, on the other hand, may lament as to when will the ongoing rush of endless emails ever slow down? The fact of the matter is that emails have become an important, if not indispensable, tool in modern business life, and are becoming more so in our personal and private lives.

But the productivity benefits that emails offer are often undermined by the sheer quantity and quality of these online notes. How can you cut down on the number of emails received and sent? Are there simple ways to make your emails more effective? This article answers these and other questions by offering a dozen helpful tips on how to improve your emails. I base these suggestions on my twenty-some years of experience of observing, receiving and sending out various types of emails in numerous setting and for various reasons. Figure 1 summarizes these 12 tips.

Details of the 12 Tips

1. Minimize use of over-sized distribution lists – Many companies provide wide distribution lists that may include everyone in a group, department, division, or even the entire company. In their zest to communicate with everyone appropriate, some employees use wider than needed distribution lists. This can clog up networks and saturate servers needlessly. Care and discretion should be exercised when using these lists.
2. Limit distribution of personal announcements – I worked at a small (less than 100 employees) firm a few years back that routinely used email to build a sense of teamwork and family. Personal announcements such as birthdays, marriages, promotions, deaths, reassignments or newborns were accepted and encouraged. But as the company rapidly expanded its size five-fold, this use of personal emails clearly became a problem. Making matters worse were the dozens of responses with 'Reply to All'. Policies were later put in place to address the issues of personal messages and how to reply to them.
3. Use judiciously the confirmation of receipt feature – This feature can be useful for critical notes involving legal or personnel matters. But often it is mis-used to the point of annoyance. Users should employ this feature only when necessary.
4. Refrain from using multiple fonts – Some emailers use a variety of fonts, colors and treatments, presumably as a part of their self-expression. I have seen pink paragraphs, neon-green numbers and an overzealous use of boldface, all-caps and italics. This sort of font formatting can make even short messages difficult to read. Standard Arial in black may seem plain but there is beauty in simplicity and practicality.
5. Turn automatic spell checking feature on – This is a feature that most all email systems offer, yet some users choose not to use it. It is not perfect and will not catch every typo, but it comes close. Most recipients of email are forgiving of minor typos and more appreciative of a quick response. Still, this is an easy feature to activate and should be used all the time.
6. Keep backgrounds to plain white – The creative side of some emailers comes out with all variations of non-white background. One of the associates of my current client tends to use rose-garden floral prints to spruce of her emails. While her emails may reflect her personal taste, they are not always well received. Background images can also add to the size of an email, taking up more mailbox space than is necessary.
7. Maintain signature blocks that are simple and professional – Some people choose to express their creativity and individuality with elaborately designed signature blocks. The last thing I would want to do is to stifle someone's creativity but there is a time and place for everything. Save your colorful artwork for your personal emails. In a business environment, simple and direct signature blocks are much more effective and usually much more appreciated.
8. Encourage your department or company to provide email guidelines and policies – Ideally, companies should provide all employees a set of email guidelines and policies. In many companies these policies are similar, but not identical, to Internet policies that discourage unprofessional or lengthy personal use of corporate resources. If you are a manger of a department you can augment existing policies, or institute them for the first time, by offering policies and guidelines unique to your department.
9. Ensure email guidelines and policies are enforced – Once email policies are established they need to be enforced. This is often done by holding managers accountable for how their employees use email. But occasionally, technology may be employed to enforce email policies. For example, one company enforces its policy of no wide-spread emails by restricting 'Reply to All' if 'Company Everyone' was part of the recipient.
10. Shorten sentences and paragraphs – Emails are far more readable if sentences and paragraphs are kept brief. This may sound obvious but it is frequently violated. I have more than once received emails in which sentences rambled on for over 50 words, and paragraphs extended on for most of a page. A good rule of thumb is 20-30 words per sentence, and 4-5 sentences per paragraph.
11. Re-read the note just before sending – News flash: spell check does not catch every typo, and little can be done to spot grammar errors. Read over your emails one final time before sending. This should at least ensure the correct meaning of your note remains intact.
12. Employ a proof-reader for highly important emails – Widely distributed emails dealing with company-critical or personnel issues need to go out mistake free. Such emails include those involving company announcements, introduction of new employees, new personnel policies, or promotions. It is always good to have another person proof read these before sending. Printing the note out for proof-reading tends to be more effective than screen reading. A recent client company of mine was being sold and executives announced that emails would come out every week on the status of the sale. The emails were always timely, much anticipated, widely read and always flawless.

Summary

Emails have become very much a reality in both our everyday business lives as well as our personal lives. This article presented 12 helpful tips for improving the management of these ever –increasing numbers of emails. The tips included ways to reduce the number of unnecessary emails that you may issue or receive, and methods to increase the effectiveness of the emails that you do send out. We may not be able to eliminate our emails, as some of you may wish, but we can certainly take steps to make them more useful and friendly. The intent of this article was to do just that.