Email: Clear, effective email eludes some managers
Can you imagine an email-free Friday?
That's right, shut down the office server. Force workers to meet at the water cooler and interact face-to-face on the key issues of the day.
It might seem impractical, and even excessive. But some companies have considered the move as email use in the workplace proliferates and spawns a host of new communication issues, including a sometimes unhealthy reliance on email to do all the talking.
“Emailing is often more work for whoever is involved,” says Xerox inside sales manager Tom Gall (Willamette MBA '99).
Still, Gall says email helps him reach colleagues in far away time zones and lowers the actual costs of communication. These benefits can be realized if workers and managers follow guidelines for effective email use. But often companies provide little instruction outside of privacy and proper use.
A survey by the Society for Human Resource Management shows that nine in 10 employees use email each day to communicate yet fewer than half of have been trained by their companies in proper usage. Meanwhile, a poll by the Pew Center found that 28 million Americans logged on to the Internet at work on a typical day in 2002.
Kaitlin Duck-Sherwood, who lives in California 's Bay Area, is an author of several titles related to effective emailing and explains why email poses challenges. She points to overload and miscommunication.
What's wrong with email?
Duck-Sherwood says that email walks a fine line between informal conversation and the more permanent traits of the written word that demand the writer to carefully evaluate meanings. Email's delivery is swift and capable of being broadcast to large audiences, whose members vary.
While walking this tight-rope, difficulties arise in the use of email. In a face-to-face situation or telephone conversation you are able to change your tone of voice, to rephrase comments and to present body language that welcomes further communication and thus promotes understanding. Email messages do not offer the benefit of these signals.
Email lacks a feedback loop.
“With email, you can't assume anything about a sender's location, time, frame of mind, profession, interests, or future value to you,” Duck-Sherwood says. “This means, among other things, that you need to be very, very careful about giving your receivers some context.”
Steps to Improve Use
The guidelines below were collected from Duck-Sherwood, managers in the Northwest and other specialists in organizational behavior and communication.
• When constructing emails, try to limit your message to one subject.
• Know your reader.
• Put a clear subject of your email in the subject line.
• Deal with emails only once.
• Limit your list of recipients and cc:'s to the people directly involved with the subject.
• Be aware of when it's OK to be curt, such as “I'm on my way to the meeting,” and when you should be meticulous and clear.
• Consider creating an email-use handbook for your organization. At Yale University , a manual and training are used to educate library staff on proper email use.
• Do not use email to fire or discipline employees.
• Follow up important emails with phone calls or face-to-face visits. This will ensure that recipients have read and understood your emails.
How it goes awry
Gall, the manager from Xerox, receives more than 100 new email messages each day. How do they get there?
The “reply-all” and “cc” buttons are partly to blame. This convenience sometimes creates more confusion than communication.
When a message pops-up in Gall's inbox that isn't specifically directed to him but instead copied, he wonders whether to reply and to whom? Such signals aren't the only cues missing from electronic messages.
According to author Nancy Adler, communication is many things:
“It is your understanding of what I mean. Communication includes sending both verbal messages (words) and non-verbal messages (tone of voice, facial expression, behavior, physical setting, etc.) It includes consciously sent messages as well as messages that the sender is totally unaware of having sent.”
Communication involves multiple layers and is a process by which people derive meaning. Messengers must encode their meaning into a form that the receiver will recognize, that is, into words and behavior.
Why we keep coming back to it
“The common inability to convey meaning is exacerbated by email,” Willamette MBA Prof. Patrick Connor says. “The tone, the tenor. They're lost.”
Keeping this in mind, managers can responsibly implement email and other Internet communication, such as internal websites, to benefit their companies.
Connor once advised a financial services company undergoing a large restructuring. The change management at this company was handled via a Web site in which management displayed a “weekly rumor” matched with the truth to quell gossip.
The president would write, “Here's the best rumor that has come to my attention and here's the skinny.”
“As a manager, you like that, debunking this week's rumor in a fashion that everyone sees immediately,” Connor said.
“The evidence is clear that the more people know and understand, the more they are able to participate effectively,” Connor said. “Electronic-information sharing increases people's ability to understand.”
In the case of the financial services company that Connor worked with, emails and the Internet acted as megaphones for management to keep employees in the loop. This efficiency has contributed to a surge in email and Internet usage in the workplace.
At Xerox, Gall plans to continue using the medium, with some boundaries. Almost daily, he passes on new information about a newly released program to his 22-member team. Doing so is easy; Gall clicks a button and instantly drops the information into their email inboxes.
“You don't want to wait,” he said. “You have to get that information into people's hands so they can use it with customers.”