Is email hurting your business relationships and productivity?

Posted by admin | Filed under Communications Tips

While email has many obvious benefits, it may also be reducing your productivity and harming your business relationships.

Email has quickly become the chosen method of communications for company workers throughout the world, but email does not come without a price. In 2007 the costs associated with the loss of worker productivity because of email interruptions was over five billion dollars, but that is not all.

How much time do you spend reading and responding to emails even before you have started on the task? How long do you spend trying to figure out what the email is actually about? Finally (and this is a favorite annoyance) how often are you included in emails that you shouldn’t be?

Another issue is that email is very impersonal. In today’s business climate, we see more and more people using email as their main way to communicate. This is not a good way to improve or even maintain good business relationships. If you are unable to meet in person, then speaking to people on the phone will have a greater impact and increase your chances of successful communications. Emails also promote anti-social behaviors and some workers will use it as a “get out of jail free card.”

Other issues associated with email are that its users are human beings and human beings sometimes make mistakes. Nevertheless, this can cause big problems including customer and vendor complaints.

As stated at the start we are not trying to undervalue the benefits that emailing provides, but we do suggest a good email policy to help improve your employee’s productivity and business relationships. Try having your employees read and respond to emails at two specific times during the day and instruct them to set up an auto-responder that explains this to people. Another tip is to make sure they are as specific as possible with the subject line and only use the “reply to all” button when absolutely necessary. Statistics show that it takes the average worker twenty minutes to “re-focus” after an unnecessary interruption.

Here is an article from author Steve Robbins that provides great tips to reduce the time spent in your in box. For a biography and more helpful articles from Steve click here.

PS. Sometimes a one-minute phone call can save two hours worth of work in email.

Tags: corporate email polcy, email, email tips, increase workers productivity, Natural Networks Blog