Using E-mail as a Management Tool
By Marilynne Rudick and Leslie O’Flahavan
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.)
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 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:
1. Use e-mail 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.
2. 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.
3. Use e-mail to create a 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.
4. Use e-mail as a brainstorming tool. E-mail
is 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.
5. 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.
6. 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. It also should be spellchecked 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.
As writer Stephen Leacock says, “Writing is no trouble: you
just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity
itself—it is the occurring which is difficult.”
Marilynne Rudick and Leslie O'Flahavan are partners in E-WRITE,
a training and consulting company in the Washington, D.C. area that
specializes in online writing. Rudick and O'Flahavan are authors
of "Clear, Correct, Concise E-Mail: A Writing Workbook
for Customer Service Agents."
E-WRITE retains copyright of this material.
Discuss this topic with other IABC members at: www.iabc.com/memberspeak.
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