Email etiquette – working smarter not harder

Every organisation is trying to ‘do more for less’, ‘invest to save’, ‘work smarter not harder’.

Time can easily be gained with good email etiquette – that time can then be used to focus on increasing revenue.

An example….

An account manager in an IT company discovers that one of his clients has not received scheduled delivery of some critical IT equipment they had purchased. So the account manager, in the interests of his client, sends an ‘URGENT’ email to 30 of his colleagues in across the operations division. The email was a report on the situation with no clear action or actions for any specific person or people. Everyone starts replying and replying to all. This goes on for the remainder of the day – nearly 900 emails were sent and received. It will have taken 4 days of cumulative staff time to deal with these emails.

And the situation was finally resolved in a series of phone calls which took a total of 2 hours. The client was satisfied. But not without a drama being created from a crisis.

Maybe the calls could have been made in the first place with any salient points confirmed in a short succinct email to the relevant people.

Then many of the 30 email recipients would have had additional time to do something more productive.

This would have been smart – and not hard