“Email etiquette – why you need it” is a topic we’re passionate about at Desk Doctors.
Email is not always treated as a business communication. Yet that’s exactly what it is. Email is a business communication. If it’s from your email address at work in your organisation and sent to anyone at all, your clients, your suppliers, your network: it is a business communication.
Some examples of poor email etiquette – no spell checking or proof reading, capitalisation, overuse of CC, overuse of High Priority, poor subject line, use of Reply to All, signature blocks incongruent with the corporate image of the organisation.
I have seen some ridiculous pink cursive signatures coming from large organisations. And some with dancing emoticons (smily faces). You don’t use 2 different letterheads in an organisation, why allow different signature blocks? Remember that you are communicating via your work persona in a business communication.
CCing is a topic that makes Executive Assistants groan. Have you ever worked in an organisation where the boss gets 150 emails a day and spends ½ their day every day in meetings. There is now way they have time to read them all. Their EA may deal with some but they’re often not allowed to. To be productive and focussed on crucial matters, you need to have a protocol in place for the use of CC in emails. Especially for those in the management team who do not have an Executive Assistant to help share the load of emails.
High importance ! The only ones I ever get that are marked high importance are NOT important to ME!
Subject lines can be used cleverly within workgroups and project teams. Here’s a simple suggestion: agree to place the project name in the subject as this enables you to use the automatic processes within your email system to alarm you, change the colour, play a specific sound.
Do you see that instead of treating all emails as equal, IF you apply some etiquette, you can work much smarter rather than harder and harder? I hope you do, as working harder and harder is not a solution to email overload, just a pathway to deterioration.
Not having email etiquette or protocols applied in your organisation is a productivity drain, creates a lack of professionalism, quality, consistency, and erodes your image.
Don’t live with it! Do something about it. The Desk Doctors would love to help you. Contact us.
With email health
The Doctors
August 1st, 2008 at 2:34 am
The Doctor is soooo correct in this diagnosis!
In my work as a senior business consultant, I have major email exchanges with CEO, senior staff and employees from a diverse array of national corporations.
These corporations burn up a lot of critical resources to produce annual strategic plans, communication and marketing themes and product “branding” to grow the corporate reputation, quality and credibility within their client base.
And yet, every day, I still see hundreds of client-related outbound emails written by frontline staff that annoy, confuse or fail to convey the messages that are essential to sustain these good business relations.
In one of my recent assignments, the greatest “bad influencer” on the 200,000 clients of that Compliance Regulator is outbound email; bombarding clients several times a day, from different parts of the agency, with incomplete, inaccurate or just plain confusing tech babble.
Email authors must understand the difference between providing information and giving knowledge and then use great email ettiquette to deliver that knowledge to clients in a credible and quality-assured fashion.
Driving your business by email lowers cost of sale, enhances profit and puts your key messages right on your client’s desktop - why do so many smart business operators treat the writing of email with such disrespect?