Love Email?

 Love Email?

Admit it now that no one is listening: how many emails do you really want to be receiving from your colleagues? We think the answer depends on whether or not you like the emails you are getting.  

Ever observant, Spin Sucks’ Gini Dietrich did some research on the subject and discovered that where she was working inner office emails were a downer. 

Here’s what she wrote about it: “The team—particularly our mid-level managers—were using email to communicate. And not just communicate but say horrible things to one another. Things they would never say in person.” 

Ah, the ol’ internet rage dance in which people find they can be aggressive without immediate consequences.

 As an aside note, many public forums now require that users use ‘real names’ so that everyone knows who is saying what. In some cases, there has been increased patrolling of those same forums to delete inappropriate content. 

Dietrich reports that there were follow-up conversations about what was and was not appropriate information to be sharing via email. And, yes, there was also professional development to upgrade, so to speak, how people talked to one another. 

What she found most interesting was that along the way everyone discovered that the email ban had a silver lining to it. Team members had to help themselves. “They learned to find their own answers instead of sending an email to ask someone else (my favorite thing to send to someone who should have Googled something instead of asked me is LMGTFY).”

She found that people were smarter than they thought they were. They were also more productive.

Along the way tensions diminished because people were communicating with one another, not shooting quick messages back and forth that offered no context. 

Dietrich suggests that others try this technique to see if it improves their communication concerns. 

Although we are in close enough proximity to each other to just call out when we’ve got information to share, we think such a challenge could be well worth the effort for those who ‘talk’ only via email. 

To read her findings, click here.

 Related Information 

Email campaigns that work