We've all heard stories about people who clicked
"send" too soon and let loose an e-mail message that
was all wrong. (Maybe you've heard about the person who sent an
R-rated love note meant for his sweetie to his professional
association's electronic mailing list.)
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But here's a story you may not have heard. One of our clients
described an e-mail message he recently received from upper
management at his biotech company. The message began with some
information about how to request annual leave. The middle
described plans to landscape the south side of the building. And
the message ended with these words. "By the way, you have a
new boss. The Product Development Team's new Director will be
James Yang. Margie Esposito, the former Director, left the
building at close of business last Friday."
Obviously, the cardinal rule of using e-mail as a management
tool is "Know when to use e-mail." Some messages, like
a sudden change in upper management, should be delivered in
person. E-mail should never be used as a substitute for personal
interaction.
But e-mail's immediacy and informality are well suited to
some common management tasks.
Read on to learn how you can make the most of e-mail as a
management tool:
Use e-mail to as a quick technique for handing out praise.
(It's one way to get your employees to read your e-mail!)
Whenever you see an opportunity to congratulate an employee for
a job well done, dash off a 5 - 7 sentence e-mail praise
message. Instead of waiting until annual review time, praise
your people at the time of their accomplishment, then save the
e-mail message to incorporate into the review.
Use e-mail to solicit your employees' input on best
practices
for a certain task or project. Review the
information they send you and summarize it. Then, submit the
summary of best practices to everyone who contributed. You may
even be able to incorporate the best practices summary into an
operations manual, a procedure, or a policy.
Use e-mail to create community
when workers are at
different sites or on different shifts. You might write a weekly
message to everyone (or an informal e-mail newsletter) to keep
people up-to-date on projects or initiatives. Use your weekly
message to request input or announce accomplishments or
deadlines. E-mail can facilitate collaboration between remote
workers so be a matchmaker; suggest employees begin an e-mail
dialogue when you believe they have important information to
share.
Use e-mail as a brainstorming tool.
E-mail's a great
help when you're in the planning or conceptual phase of a
project. Send out an e-mail request for quick open-ended input.
Make it clear that you welcome your employees' random,
short-burst thinking. Be sure they know this is one time when
they definitely don't have to send a well-crafted reply.
Develop small e-mail distribution lists
instead of big
ones. People hate "All Staff" messages. They hate
sifting through an inbox full of messages that barely apply to
the work they do. So don't send a message to the list unless
everyone on the list really needs to know. And don't reply to
the list when only the writer needs to read your reply. As
manager, you should discuss these fine points of list etiquette
with the e-mail writers in your department and help everyone
send only "need to know" messages.
Communicate standards for good e-mail writing, and model
good writing yourself.
When e-mail is well-written, it is a
real time-saver. But when it's poorly written it is a dreadful
time-waster. Protect your employees from this time-waster by
developing standards for writing e-mail. Tell people that you
expect e-mail to be organized so the main point of the message
appears on the first screen, to be spell-checked, and not to be
written in ALL CAPS. Think of it this way - your organization
probably has an e-mail use policy that covers who owns the
system and whether e-mail messages are private. Accompany the
use policy with writing guidance and you'll get the most out of
the e-mail system and the employees who use it.
About the Authors:
Leslie O'Flahavan and Marilynne Rudick are partners in
E-WRITE. Both are experienced print and online writers and
teachers. E-WRITE teaches the new rules for writing well in the
electronic age. We develop and teach writing courses,
write the content for web sites, and translate print to online
writing. At the E-WRITE web site http://www.ewriteonline.com
- you can enroll in web and e-mail writing courses, subscribe to
a free newsletter, the E-Writing Bulletin, take an EQ
(E-mail Quotient) Test, review web writing winners in the Web
Writing Showcase, and learn about many online writing resources.
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