I came across this interesting article & video on the potential pitfalls of email communication in the workplace.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304704504579433233994478174
Have you experienced this? I have! I'll spend ages crafting an email so I come across professional and provide enough information and then I'll get either a short yes or no back or a response that hasn't answered my question and confuses me further!
Don't get me wrong, emails are great most of the time & there are loads of benefits in having emails. I think that the key here is adapting your style to the person you are communicating with and sometimes picking up the phone maybe be more effective.
"To effectively communicate, we must realise that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others"
Replies
Great links Mike & agree with breaking the mold. We should start a revolution! 'Reply All' is a pet peeve of mine, especially if i didn't need to be copied in to it in the first place!
One thing i have noticed that keeps cropping up is when discussing the whole "email traffic" thing with colleagues and friends is that a big reason people give for sending emails is so there's a paper trail that they've done or said something. This screams of lack of trust between colleagues! Sometimes it is necessary but maybe if we spent more time developing our work relationships than sending emails we'd generate less traffic & collaborate more?
Ady i think that's a great way you've got to work with your boss, it obviously works well for both of you. Agreed that it does make me smile if someone is sat in the same office as me yet still sends me an email. So recently I've choosen to always get up and walk to their desk & start with "i got your email do you have time to talk about it now..." Often solves the issues quicker than firing off lots of emails.
Hi Jill,
Great topic. I guess the more and more access we have to our emails on the move, the more and more email traffic we can expect to generate. Great links too Mike and I'm with you on the time to break the mould.
I've almost (not quite but almost) given up emailing my boss. This isn't because he doesn't respond, or is too short with his responses or actually any other reflection on anything he is or isn't doing. It's just out of respect really. Respect of the fact that I know he's swamped each and every day with them.
You see my boss and I work remotely from each other and are only really in the same place at the same time once a week at the most. So there's a temptation to forward an email on to him for comment/decision etc or perhaps drop him an email note on something I'm working on. I can't imagine this being very helpful to his situation of growing email traffic.
So what I do instead is keep a note of things that I need to catch up with him on, and then run through them all in a oner with him. Yes it might be a half hour catch up on the phone, but I'm sure it's a huge time saving for us both. And a more insightful, useful conversation as a result too.
It still makes me chuckle when I get an email from someone the other side of the office! It's a little old school now!
Great post and question posed here. Are emails really effective?
Think about how much time we waste on email and how much email traffic is sent each day within one organisation. I'm a member of a Google Plus community called "Life without Email" and I came across this infograph that's worth sharing here.......
Email vs Social Business Infographic
Whilst this is specific to asking a question the principles of using email versus social tools still stands
Here is another good resource on the 'effective email' debate
Still think email is effective?
Surely there are other ways however we are wired around email.....time to break the mold.