When it comes to email management, your challenges can be addressed with just a small few tweaks that result in big gains. The question is - what small tweaks and where to get started? Here are our 7 deadly sins of email management and the resolutions to ease your pain.
Sin 1: Not taking email seriously as part of your information management strategy
Resolution: There is plenty of critical project data residing within your email. So, if you are worried by audit trails, regulatory requirements, finding key correspondence over email, and more, email should form a key part of your information and BIM strategies.
Sin 2: Spending vast amounts of money on a solution that’s not fit for purpose, and your team doesn’t use it.
Resolution: Opt for a cost-effective, easy to use plugin, with minimal downtime and little training needed to get started. Smart, intelligent email prompting will ensure staff use the software across the entire business. That means everyone will work the same way and adhere to the same processes and ISO standards, removing the reliance on staff filing in their own way, in their own folders, by standardising filing throughout the business.
Sin 3: Fee-earners wasting precious time hunting for project correspondence in Outlook.
Resolution: Prevent time being wasted hunting for project correspondence in Outlook with three-click functionality to find any email in any project in seconds. You should quickly be able to reproduce all correspondence on any project for litigation purposes when you need to protect yourself in a dispute.
Sin 4: Implementing software that burdens your IT team with a lot of infrastructure changes, and results in a loss of control.
Resolution: Your emails are your information. Email management shouldn’t result in a loss of ownership, or require drastic changes to your existing set-up. Your email management solution should work with your existing infrastructure, with email filing to a location of your choice. Plus, you should be able to easily control who has access to certain project folders.
Sin 5: Mistakenly thinking your entire team is up to speed on all aspects of a project when, in reality, they only have access to their own inbox.
Resolution: Firstly, gain access to information in an individual’s inbox, irrespective of whether they’re out of the office or have left the business. Secondly, gain confidence in the knowledge that everything is accessible instantly, by every member of your project team. You should be able to access both sides of a conversation with received and sent filing, so you can see what you originally agreed to at any time, by any person in the team. Wave goodbye to disparate remote teams and say hello to a fully connected workforce.
Sin 6: Spending extra money on email storage, while continually being warned about full inboxes, and overusing email.
Resolution: Reduce the amount of storage needed for email overnight by de-duplicating huge files being filed multiple times. Additionally, think before you send an email. Does it warrant pressing send? Most communications can be done through a different channel - a phone call, instant messenger and text. The more emails you send, the more emails you will receive, making ‘Inbox Zero’ a much harder goal.
Sin 7: Spending too much time checking your emails throughout the day.
Resolution: Set aside dedicated ‘email time’ to go through your inbox. Reading and responding to emails in real-time will actually eat at your day and make you less productive and more stressed. Check your email two or three times a day, with your full attention, and ignore them for the rest of the day.
There you have it, seven resolutions to resolve your email headache and turn email from a pain into a competitive advantage. Try Mail Manager for free now and see how our intuitive project-based software can quickly revolutionise the way your business ‘does’ email.
