Do You Hate Work Email?

Imagine that you're away from your desk at work for a while. You come back and immediately refresh your email. And you watch message after message populate your screen. Suddenly your stress level goes up.

So what's the problem with email? Would we be better off without it? Perhaps but it is a valuable tool and it's not going away anytime soon. Fire is also a tool but you wouldn't give it to someone if they didn't understand how to use it. That's the problem with a lot of organizations: They assume that people know how to effectively communicate through email. With that in mind, here are some suggestions for improving your messages:

Don't Over Write: Have you ever found yourself having to read a message over and over? I'm guessing it's because it wasn't clear. Put anyone in front of a keyboard and a simple request can become paragraphs. If you have to use email, keep your message simple and to the point. Confusion doesn't help your business.

No Tone: In email, it's not easy to tell the tone of a message. Imagine if your boss wrote, "Get it done." Is that an demand, a joke, or something in between? You can't tell and again, you have to spend time trying to figure out the meaning. Some like to put important things in bold or italics, but again, you're relying on people to understand your intention.

People Feel They Have to Respond: Ever see a simple request from the boss go out to staff and ever staff member feels they need to reply. Those replies are sent to everyone so everyone has to stop what they're doing to read it. Do you want your team spending their valuable time doing this?

Was That Important? How many times do you have to repeat something that you emailed a few days ago? There's just something about seeing a message on a screen that makes it hard for people to remember. Plus we get so many emails nowadays that it's easy to lose one in your inbox or you forget to get back to it later.

Let Go of the Mouse: Use email only for general things that you want people to know about, as if it was. an electronic bulletin board. This could include an announcement of quarterly earnings, the score from last night's softball game, and employee promotions. For action items, like a new dress code, sales strategy, or news of a visit from the corporate office, resort to good old-fashioned person-to-person verbal communication. This can be done at a staff meeting or having the information communicated down by supervisors. If you must, then you can send out an email that outlines the action item. You may think this will take a lot of time but in the end you'll save time by eliminating misunderstandings.