How to Take Back Control of E-mail
E-mail is a growing source of stress and frustration in the workplace. Rather than being the efficient tool we all need, it can dominate and even intrude on our general effectiveness. So how can we take back control and let it work for us, rather than the other way round? To harness your own e-mail activity, and to help your employees do the same, the issue needs to be tackled at both a practice and a policy level.
Encourage all users to check their e-mails periodically rather than continually. The ‘new e-mail’ alert should be switched off and e-mails checked at a time when the user decides. How often depends on the nature of the job – for some people, once or twice a day will be sufficient. Others may need to check every two hours. The stress and inefficiency of responding to every new e-mail as it arrives should be obvious, but it can become almost addictive. Opening in batches is more efficient and less stressful.
Manage your e-mails according to the 3D rule:
Encourage people to use hyperlinks to documents if they are on the shared network drive, rather than attach them – it not only reduces the size of the e-mail but also ensures that each recipient accesses the same and most up-to-date version of the document. If it’s not on the network, large documents should be compressed and small ones may be better pasted into the body of the e-mail itself.
Most e-mail programmes have a function that automatically moves incoming e-mails to an appropriate folder by subject matter or sender. So, for example, the CIPD e-newsletter can be filed into a ‘CIPD’ folder so you can read it when time permits without having to trawl through your inbox or file it manually. Spam or junk mail that gets past your main e-mail filters can be permanently deleted by a rule. It also helps for people to know immediately if an e-mail is for information (FYI), action (FYA), a response to something previous (RES) or just a quick message (QM). The QM can even be limited to the subject line.
It’s easy to assume that everyone knows how to use e-mail, so it may not even appear on the induction checklist for new starters. Ensure people know how to set up new folders so they can organise their e-mails systematically. E-mail and electronic calendars or diaries should be integrated so the e-mailed agenda and relevant papers are saved with the appointment reminder. Decide who is responsible for e-mail training – HR, IT or both? It’s more cost-effective to host a workshop for 12-20 people with an external trainer than send staff on external courses.
Initial training is good but make sure follow-up help and support is available, either through refresher courses (30 minutes after lunch can make significant changes to e-mail stress levels) or by offering at-desk support. It’s worth identifying an e-mail champion or ‘guru’ for each team to provide peer support, rather than relying on HR or IT staff. You often find that someone in a team has learnt some good habits for managing their own e-mail. Encourage them to share their knowledge and make sure their line manager supports them in this role.
Develop guidelines on when to use e-mail. Sometimes people need to be reminded that a phone call or face-to-face discussion is more appropriate, knowing how easily an e-mail can be misinterpreted or lead to a chain reaction. It’s worth including information on when and who to copy in. Guidelines should not be too long – you can probably publish a helpful double-sided A5 leaflet with bullet points and practical advice as well as important policy notes.
So many inboxes get cluttered with ‘all staff’ circular e-mails. A weekly e-bulletin that collates as much information as possible is not as big a task as it may seem. HR teams often find it useful to manage this process, using one mailbox to collect the various messages and then cutting and pasting them into a standard format. The e-bulletin can be added to the intranet if you have one that works well. For legitimate use of the ‘all staff’ address (such as for urgent messages), encourage people to use expiry options for time-limited messages. That way the e-mail is deleted before it’s even seen if people are away, so they don’t have the frustration of ploughing through and deleting redundant messages.
One source of e-mail stress is the fear of losing that one really important e-mail, so people often keep everything ‘just in case’. This can mean a huge inbox or lots of separate folders. Check that users know how to archive e-mails to keep them in their organised folders by date order – so if you vaguely remember that a particular e-mail came in last May, you can click open the ‘May archive’ and find it more quickly than if you had to search through the past six months of messages. Archiving also reduces the network load and the risk that your mailbox cannot accept new e-mails – and hence the stress inducing ‘network over limit’ messages.