The fact is that integrating solid e-mail etiquette skills in your day to day business e-mail activities will help to make you a more efficient communicator. Those who you e-mail regularly will appreciate these efforts as you will help to make doing business with you easier and them more efficient as well.
I thought about this today as I was answering my overflowing inbox where I found e-mails that made replying difficult, requests that had already been answered asking where my answers were and inquiries that were vague at best. This caused me to have to dig out my previous replies and resend them to the same individuals, ask questions for information to better clarify the request so I could answer with confidence added with the chore of having to weed through previous back and forth to figure out what was new that I was supposed to respond to.
These type of e-mails took more of my time to have to respond to and made me inefficient. As is usually the case, I thought “this will make a great topic for Business E-mail Etiquette!” Here are the issues that I took note of today that made both sides spend more time than necessary with their e-mail communications — all of which can easily be resolved with minuscule effort.
- Before responding to a e-mail, order your e-mails by Sender. This will help you see any subsequent e-mails on the same topic that you can then easily combine into just one e-mail reply. Minimizing the number of e-mails is a benefit to everyone involved.
- On that same note, consolidate your thoughts and put them in one e-mail using a bulleted list as I am doing here. Sending numerous e-mails with just one thought, concern or question takes unnecessary time for the Sender to send and the Recipient to have to weed through.
- Down-editing your replies is the sign of a tech savvy skilled communicator. Always remove what is no longer necessary to the conversation. Only leave what you are specifically replying to so the person on the other side knows what your comments correspond to. To have to review an entire email looking for the one spot where you inserted a “no” as your answer reflects a lack of concern for the time of the person you are communicating with.
- Before assuming that a request was not acknowledged or processed, check your inbox, trash or spam folders to make sure that you did not in fact receive the desired response or information before you send off an accusatory follow-up. Add important contacts to your address book or whitelist to ensure your contact’s e-mails can get through any filtering your software may have in place.
- When making an request, be sure to do your best to include all the possible information the other side will need to assist you. The more time you take to provide all the necessary details and information that the other side will need to respond to your request, the faster you will receive the response you desire.
These are just the 5 things that stuck out today that caused me lost time and efficiency. Clearly Business E-mail Etiquette serves to assist all involved in using the least amount of time tapping away at these keyboards thereby freeing us all up to have more time to do our jobs and run our businesses.
What can those you communicate with do to help make you more efficient?
Some More Info for You:
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What about a dialogue of emails (at work) on the same topic. Mrs. T sends out an email to all staff in a department asking for feedback. Ms. C forwards Mrs. T’s email to staff under her lead. Staff J. replies to Ms. C’s email and copies Mrs. T (the originator of the initial email and the person making the initial request). The information in the email was the same topic, with no personal or private information in it, strictly business related information. Has either Ms. C or Staff J. broken any email etiquette rules?
Hey, Jeanie:
What you don’t explain is what Ms. C’s e-mail instructed those under her lead to do and was Mrs. T Cc:’d in this request? Did she not provide any direction and just forward Mrs. T’s e-mail leaving the door open to including Mrs. T in the reply was possibly expected? Without knowing those details, my initial reaction is that common courtesy would be to reply to the Sender alone — in this case Ms. C.
There could be two issues here. If Ms. C wanted her staff to reply to her for her to summarize to Mrs. T, she should have not just forwarded the e-mail request from Mrs. T. She should have hand-crafted her own e-mail asking for their input.
The second issue would be the person who felt the need to Cc: Mrs. T on her reply (if Mrs. T was NOT Cc: on Ms. C’s request) instead of just replying directly to Ms. C. This can be viewed as showboating or going around established channels and leave a poor impression.
If I were Ms. C, I would have asked my staff for their feedback on the topic with my own e-mail request. This would have allowed me to organize and summarize the feedback I received into one concise e-mail to Mrs. T. On the other side of the coin, when asked for feedback based on an included forwarded e-mail, I would only reply to the Sender, not the originator of the forwarded e-mail. Mrs. T didn’t ask me directly for my feedback; Ms. C. did.
HTH!