Managing email

17 June 2008

If you don’t make a habit of cooling down before firing off flame mails, it’s time for a reality check. Excerpts from emails now routinely feature in employment and contract lawsuits, and any ill-judged words you use when you’re letting off steam could shoot holes in your case if they’re ever read out in court. Worse, unless you’ve got a very well thought out email management policy in place, you’re going to spend a long time trying to dig out all the relevant emails if you do ever get into a dispute. As Garry Mathiason, a top US employment attorney from law firm Littler Mendelson, once put it: “The first thing people have to learn is what emails are. In litigation, the ‘e’ stands for evidence.”

But that’s not all it stands for. For knowledge workers struggling to manage hundreds of emails a day, the ‘e’ is just as much about ‘exhaustion’. With a constant barrage of messages disrupting their thought processes and distracting them from getting their real work done, “office productivity” tools are actually making many of us less productive than we ought to be. One research firm, Basex, estimates that the US economy loses $650bn in productivity and innovation through “unnecessary interruptions” from mobile phones, emails, texts, instant messages and the like. 

That realisation brought several top US technology firms together last week to form a not-for-profit group focused on tackling the worst excesses of electronic communications. The likes of IBM, Google, Microsoft and Intel are setting out to research the impact of information overload on our working lives and devise ways to help individuals and companies cope. If you’re the kind of person who finds they get more done when they work from home, log off from the company email server and ignore the phone, you’ll know exactly where they’re coming from.

Both problems – the threat of litigation and lost productivity – are big issues for employers. But few companies take the time to get to grips with them. It’s partly because email, text messages, mobile phones and the like are so ubiquitous that the idea of regulating them seems a little Luddite. It’s also because enforcement touches on privacy issues that are tricky to grapple with – you might have an unwritten rule that prevents people from surfing the web on company time, but do you really want to install software to monitor the sites your employees visit? And there’s a further issue around gradual merging of work and home life. Small businesses expect their key employees to be available out of hours for an emergency, and to work late where necessary. In return, employees quite reasonably expect to be able to pay their bills online and sort out other domestic matters during the working day. 

But none of these issues should prevent companies from taking basic precautions – particularly ones that can save big legal bills in the future. One good starting point is to make sure everyone in your company knows that email messages – and often instant messages – are permanently recorded. So disparaging remarks about employees are out, and anything that might come back to haunt you in a contractual relationship with a customer or partner is best left unwritten. Tell your employees to stop before they hit the send button and imagine a barrister reading out their email. I once heard the former boss of a manufacturing company being questioned in court about a rashly worded internal document, and it wasn’t pretty – particularly the bit where he complained that one of his products looked like it had been dragged down the motorway tied to the back of a lorry.

Secondly, establish a policy on preserving your emails. Some of these messages employees send count as company records, and if you’re ever sued or otherwise investigated you may need access to them. Most small businesses preserve emails on the basis of storage space – but you should really be storing them on the basis of content. So you need to define a clear policy on what should be kept and what can go.

Thirdly, remind your employees about their legal responsibilities. If they use email to bully or harass their peers they could be breaking the law.

From a productivity perspective, there are some basic protocols that you can ask every employee to follow.  

• Reduce the number of times you check your inbox each day. If someone needs a really urgent response, they’ll probably call 

• Don’t feel you have to respond on the spot to non-urgent customer emails. In fact, if you answer customers instantly each time they make contact, they may wonder whether you’ve got enough business coming in to keep you occupied

• Remember that the ‘instant’ in ‘instant messaging’ reflects the speed of the communication mechanism – it’s not an instruction on how quickly you need to respond

• Avoid using the ‘reply all’ feature in email wherever possible. You should only copy in people who might actually benefit from hearing from you

• Read emails through before you send them. It’s a basic courtesy for the recipient and has the added advantage of stopping you looking stupid

• Feel free to write emails in anger. But never send them until you’ve calmed down, consulted a colleague and thought about the bigger picture

• Remember that tone of voice doesn’t always translate well into the written word, particularly if people don’t know you well. Irony, for example, really doesn’t travel well, especially internationally

By Keith Rodgers, Webster Buchanan Research