Making email work for your organisation instead of it blocking communications

Productivity – email steals your days

e-mail is a poor form of communication – so what can your organisation do to make it work better?

Staff spend too much time at their PC’s and use e-mail to drive their daily agenda, control communication and share information. Everyone works longer hours but the company achieves less.

Symptoms

• staff communicate inefficiently, most time is spent being reactive (waiting for the next e-mail) instead of being proactive.
• Conversation and discussion become less important than defending a position  or commenting on earlier e-mails in long and dispersed e-mail chains.
• Lots of time is spent using e-mail to do things that could be dealt with quickly by phone or in person.
• E-mail is misguidedly used to try and communicate on sensitive issues with the result that bigger problems ensue.
• Productivity falls whilst working hours go-up.
• Collaboration becomes slower and less frequent

Solutions

1. Establish healthy e-mail usage rules which encourage good habits where e-mail is useful.
2. Encourage the use of other forms of communications where these do the job better.
3. Teach how to deal well with some of the areas that e-mail is being used as a substitute for (e.g. staff management problems, communication failure, team problem solving, inter-group working).
4. Review success of programme and continue to tailor it to suit.

How Peopleware can help: we can define best practice, run courses or a broader programme to change the whole way in which e-mail is used within the organisation and by individuals. The result is more productive time and happier staff.