49 posts categorized "Email Rules"

February 21, 2012

Is Email Your Company's Secret Weapon Or Achille's Heel?

E-mail-overload
Your company's culture springs up based on the conversations leaders lead and actions they allow. "How are things done around here?" is the most important question you need to manage if you want to build a positive and strong culture.  

Think of communication tools, then, as culture-building devices.  Meetings, casual conversations, phone calls, email exchanges and letters/documents - all of these comprise The Conversation. But among them, one stands out as the 800 Pound Gorilla: email.  It's anywhere from 1/2 to 90% of your conversational life both inside and outside the company. 

That's why entrepreneur and Tech Stars teacher Mark Sullivan advised all new CEO to "not suck at email."  Get that part of your leadership life wrong, and bad things will always cascade down from it. It amazes me that very few companies have an "Excellence Area" for email.  Most don't even offer Email Etiquette Training.  

Most companies have an Obscenity Avoidance policy to prevent harassment suits, excessive foul language, etc.  They teach Duh' level techniques, like "Don't Always Hit Reply To All" when email is flooding everyone's Inbox like a tsuanmi.  But that's reactive.

Email is either your secret weapon or achille's heel.  Here are some examples: 

1.  Customer Mangement - When you receive an email from a ticked off customer, what's the policy? At broadcast.com, Mark Cuban had The Two Minute Call Rule.  For our business services group, every one of us was expected to phone a ticked off or disappointed customer withing two minutes of reading the email from them.  It made us very accountable, and usually, the ticked off customer was somewhat apologetic about the tone of his email!  It separated us from other companies, where the email was socialized around for the 'best response' (read: cover your butt!). The gap in time between the Send and your live response almost always simmers the customer to the boiling point.  And email reads horribly unless you are saying YES! to whatever they are demanding.

2. Talent Management - Is your email policy a benefit or a penalty for your talent?  At top-rated employer SAS Institute, it's how they attract top talent and keep them for life.  Dr. Jim Goodnight believes that we should turn off our computers around 5, go home and live our life.  And weekends should be ... weekends.  His Email Only During Professional Hours policy is a recruiting tool and also ensures top quality work and less meltdowns.  Do you think your 11:30pm missive, a product of sipping and sending, is really that coherant? 

3. Conflict Resolution -  When I worked at Yahoo, we brought in Reader's Digest veteran Greg Coleman in 2002.  He was appalled at how much he had to manage complaints between his reports.  So he required anyone with a complaint about another Yahoo, to tell the other Yahoo to his/her face or phone if they aren't local.  If they still needed him involved, he'd consider it.  It created a culture of courage, where you dealt with your issues with real-time conversations among grown-ups.

But many companies have an email culture where you copy bosses and other influencers to get your way.  Or even worse, you use email to disagree, criticize or talk about emotionally weight things ... so you don't have to have a live conversation.  This can only lead to problems, as email is a terrible way to convey our intentions.  If you've ever received an email from a boss saying, "that is stupid" and boiled about it for weeks - you know what I mean. 

Here's more posts on how to turn Email Into Your Secret Weapon

 

January 25, 2011

How to cut your incoming email by half (and get more done)

E-mail-overload
If you are getting too many emails, it's likely you are a manager.

Depending on your corporate or company culture, it's easy to get 100 or 200 emails a day - all expecting your precious attention.  There are less leaders than two years ago, so more people report to you or feel the need to report to you.  The CC/CYA gang copies you on everything, the good the bad and the irrelevant.  You've made your way on so many internal distribution lists, your blackberry sounds like a Vegas casino, going off all the time 24/7.  

So what to do?  You can't possible keep doing this, and expect to get any time to think through the problems of the business.  You can't ignore it, because it will just pile up and when your Inbox has 500 in it, you'll feel pressure and likely feel depressed.  And guilty. 

A few years ago, I was getting over 300 emails a day, and it was crushing me.  So, after doing some research, to coin a Tim Ferriss term, I built a hack for it.  Within 90 days, I cut my incoming emails to less than 100 a day, and my Inbox never had more than about 40 or 50 items in it to be filed/responded to or deleted.  How did I do it? 

1 - Sell The Group On Low Information: Tell every one of your email buddies that you are going on a low information, or need-to-read, diet.  Explain that by being more succinct and self-reliant, we'll have enough time to solve problems and innovate.  Tell direct reports to consider this part of their annual review (Return On Attention). 

2 - Use the CLEAR system on repeat offenders.  This is where you send a nicely-but-firmly written letter (see post) that instructs people to ask five questions before they send you and email:  *C/Is it connected to my job? *L/Give me a list of what you want me to do about it. *E/What do you expect from me in this situation? *A/What are my avenues to delegate? R/What's the return on my attention and time?  This really reduced the noise level.  For many, they never considered things from my point of view. 

3 - Tell people to Stamp Out Reply To All.  Put it in your email footer (Please join me in my SORTA campaign to Stamp Out Reply To All!) 

4 - Don't respond to every email, just the ones where your response adds value.  Silence on your end can certainly close the loop in many situations - and those who are just noise will realize that you are either not reading them, or choosing not to respond.  

Visit www.EmailAtoZ.com for more ideas or to find out about my training program for companies. 

 

October 22, 2010

The missing training program at work

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I cannot believe that companies don't train new-hires on email etiquette prior to handing out email addresses (with the brand in them), mobile email devices and digital keys to the broadband kingdom.  

This would be like the police issuing guns to new beat cops, only training those that accidently shoot the wrong person or fail to tag a fleeing felon.  But companies do this, and I should know, my company's Email Etiquette Program has been administered to over 50,000 people at this point.  In almost every case, there was no formal training in place.  

I suspect that it's just a matter of time until email is recognized as the dominant corporate communication channel, making excellent/etiquette training a no-brainer.  Until that time comes, expect to see: 

*  Endless email threads that only complicate projects  *  Lawsuits for inappropriate content 

* Relationship misunderstandings via emails  *  Wasted time and missed opportunities 

Does your company have anything in place to teach style, values, branding and rules to your people? It starts with a point of view:

1.  Email is weak when it comes to conveying emotions.  

2.  Less is more, don't wear out your Inbox welcome. 

3.  Email is forever. When you hit send, it's going to be archived somewhere.

Those three points give your training group a framework for helping your people master the fine art of digital one-to-some communications.  In my case, Deeper Media identified twelve rules that capture these three points, starting with #1: Stamp Out Reply To All.

Contact me to bring this training to your group

Recommended read: Send: Why People Email So Badly, And How To Do It Better 

 

October 13, 2010

The headline matters more than ever (the subject line)

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Face it; your emails are part of a snow storm blowing into someone's Crack berry or  smart phone.  Instead of carefully reading through the items in your inbox, your recipients scroll them like spinning a roulette wheel.  I see it every day on the road. 

They open a few, answer even less, and your carefully written action-required email is ignored.  

If you want to jump out of the e-noise and improve your readership with your email buddies,  you need to hone your skills at writing good subject lines.  Think about newspapers, their MVPs are the people that come up wit eye-grabbing headlines.  We've been trained our whole life to scan for must-reads.  Same goes with emails or blog titles.  Good headlines drive click through.  

The basics are:
* Vague is bad
* Hey! is not a real subject line
* RE: RE: FW: FW: is not attractive and will not be read right away

When I know someone well, I will make a call to action in the subject line if my email is intended to get someone to do something. If I need to change a call, I put it in the subject line. If I need you to send me a file, I put it in the subject. You'd be amazed how your response rates jumps.

When I am in a less intimate business relationship, I work on a three to five word subject that zeros in on why I'm sending the email. If we are working on an event together I'll put "About the sales conference" in the subject.

When you reply, feel free to start a new subject (too often we just reply and the subject line stays the same, except now with a RE: before it.) Let the new subject line redefine where the email thread is going. This not only helps to focus the email exchange on a real outcome, it keeps the conversation going. This is especially true if many of your email buddies are usually mobile. They scroll through subjects and make their choices almost on impulse. 

Now let's talk blog posts or FB Notes: Banal titles don't drive click thrus or retweeets.  You need to grab them with either a provocative statement or a relevant promise (my approach, usually).  If you improve your headlining to gather attention, you'll see your statistics jump like you did when you learned or outsourced search engine optimization.  Don't be lazy here, you've done a great deal of work on that great post you want everyone to read.  

To sharpen your headline skills, visit Daily Beast or Huffington Post and study the relationship between clever headlines and retweets or comments.  Do the same over at Yahoo sports.  Don't bother with visually driven sites like TMZ as the gossip is the draw.

This is one of the ideas I teach over at my Email Training Website.  Email is the vast majority of your knowledge output, so consider yourself a publisher that need to focus as much on form as content.  

 

February 15, 2010

The End Of Attachments

One of my Dirty Dozen Rules Of Email Etiquette is: "Don't Be So Heavy" 

Simply put, you cannot be sure how fast your email recipient's connection speed is, so don't send something bigger than a few megabytes via an attachment.  In my training program, I recommend using the YouSendIt service to park big files in the sky, notifying your recipient that it's waiting on them to download at their convenience.  

Recently, I realized that regardless of size, most attachments don't need to be sent. Instead, they need to be parked in the cloud.  Last month, I had a professional photog (Lesley Bohm) shoot new photos of me for a new website, new book cover, etc.  She shot massive raw files, which gives me the freedom to use for blow up posters at speaking events or thumbnail size headshots for brochures, FB, etc.  

After doing some photoshop work, she sent me the three top pics 8X12 300DPI (these are 7 - 10 meg files).  I needed to send these to a meeting planner that was setting up promotion for an upcoming event.  So I parked the three files on Typepad, and sent URLs to the meeting planner with "right click to save as or drag to desktop" instructions.  No need for attachments. 

Examples: Picture One, Picture Two, Picture Three

A few days later, I was sending my customized reading recommendations for hair dressers and salon owners to a few dozen people who'd email me for one - and I did the same thing.  Parked the PDF on Typepad, and sent the URL.  It saves me time (no step to attach, no "ooops forgot to send attachment re-sends).  Previously, when sending out PDFs or any type of non-pic attachment, I got the occasional response that they didn't receive the information or the attachment didn't come through.  No more with my new cloud attachment program - It's just a click away. 

Here's another email management advantage to this approach: Reduces the size of your Outlook/Entourage data file. (Video) You see, when you send an attachment, your computer stores an extra copy of it in your data file, and eventually you'll get a bloated file (multiple gigs) that causes your email client to take a long time to launch, run slow or produce the dreaded "broken data base" error message that requires rebuilding your file or using your backup/restore software.  As part of my email training, I've always advised keeping your email data file slim by archiving and permanent delete.  Using a no-attachment approach is another way to keep your file slim and speedy. 

By the way, companies like Kraft Foods and Novell Software have licensed my Email Etiquette Training Program for their employees - it's no brainer training for the information age.  Contact me for information on how you can bring it to your company. 

January 12, 2010

Stamp Out Reply To All

From my training program, The Dirty Dozen Rules Of Email Etiquette, here's Rule #3 -- Stamp Out Reply To All.  This is a huge problem for many of us working in mid to large companies.  

Watch this video clip and find out why Reply To All must be dealt with and how to convince others to stop using it all the time. VIDEO: Rule #3 Stamp Out Reply To All 

Find out more about email training for your company

November 02, 2009

Don't use email to go over someone's head

From my email etiquette training program, here's a simple but hard to follow rule: Don't use email to get your way via escalation.  

I'm sure all of us have either used this passive aggressive technique or been abused by it.  Using email to pull rank on someone is a prescription for disaster.  This is just one of 12 rules that everyone should follow -- especially your employees that represent your brand.  Contact me for details on the program. 

Rule 2: Don't Email Over Someone's Head 



August 11, 2009

Is email overload too much information?

Leave it up to researchers at Harvard to prove the impossible:Email overload is good. Harvard study suggests email overload gives us a unique perspective

This, of course, assumes that the amount of information you absorb doesn't wear you down mentally and trigger depression (see New Economy Depression Syndrome.) Up until that point, though, the research suggests that a new kind of smart is cropping up: Decoding intelligence.

What do you think? Has email given you a unique lens to see the world in ways your parents couldn't? Chirp in some comments or post to the my dedicated email excellence blog!

Visit EmailAtoZ for more ideas on how to iimprove your digi-communications.

August 03, 2009

Let your bizmates have their vacation!

When one of your biz partners (employee, vendor, coworker) is on his or her annual summer vacation – do them a favor and leave them alone! When I worked at Yahoo, I put my employee’s vacation days into my calendar to remind me to leave them off threads or BCC/CCs. When there was an email that they would eventually need to see or be copied on (when they got back), I would part it in the draft folder, then send all of them the day they returned. The research I conducted for my Email Etiquette training program indicates that a person would rather get twenty emails first thing on Monday, coming back from time off, than twenty emails spread out over their vacation. Why? When you send emails to people on vacation, they feel the need to check their email more often, respond to you and get engaged again with work. This destroys the healing process of time off and is quite inconsiderate on your part. Great managers and business partners let their people take real time off. No chatter, CYA-FYI junk, just pure time off. After all, you wouldn’t call his or her cell phone twenty times while they were on vacation! Check out more ideas on better email behavior at: EmailAtoZ

July 22, 2009

Friends don't let friends sip then send (emails)

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Last December, the New York Times ran a side splitting story about people who send emails or texts while under the influence of alcohol (Drunk, and Dangerous, at the Keyboard).

Funny, but true, we can wreck our lives over email if we've been drinking!  In the study behind The Dirty Dozen Rules of Email Etiquette (an excellent program to bring into your company), we found that grammar and syntax errors jump almost 50% when users send emails after having a single cocktail or a few beers.  Their use of profanity jumps too. 

The lesson:  Never assume you can master email while tipsy.  Much like driving, alcohol will give you a false sense of security.  For that matter, consider blowing off email after dinner entirely.  This is very true for business life -- turn it off and get some sleep! 

Check out EmailAtoZ for more email tips.  

Does your company need email etiquette training? Let me know and I'll contact you right away. 

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