It’s time to rethink the corporate email
Despite the enormous disadvantages and inefficiencies compared to collaborative environments, the use of email in business is still extremely common. Such organizations are often slow and cumbersome, and the workforce often feels that if they had to answer all the emails they receive, they would do nothing else all day than answer them. The email kills productivity and defines the extent to which a company has adapted to new times.
Throw other bad practices into the mix and the situation becomes ridiculous. In many organizations, CC abuse makes email use a cumulative deadly trap: the higher up managers are, the more people they tend to put in the CC field which creates an unsustainable pull on resources. When email disclaimers, a vague set of legal notices, privacy policies, anti-virus usage notices and other totally useless information, are automatically added to all outgoing emails, we are into the realms of the surreal, particularly when we try to review the thread of a conversation.
The use of email disclaimers has been discussed on numerous occasions, and there seems to be an ample consensus: in addition to clogging things up, their legal value is questionable. There are practically no cases where the use of an email disclaimer at the foot of an email has served any purpose other than to give the psychopaths in legal counseling departments something to do. They serve no purpose, they simply occupy space, and increasingly, they transmit the image of an outdated company. Go to your legal advisory department to ask why the heck is attached to every damn email, and if they tell you how necessary they are, fire them and find somebody else. You’ll save a lot of time.
Another common practice in external communication, is the use of no-reply. You send an email to a client or prospect, possibly part of an email marketing campaign, but you do it from a no-reply @ address. If the recipient turns out to be interested or wants to ask a question, what on Earth are they supposed to do? In short, a practice that should be eliminated.
Adding a logo as a graphic file at the end of each email, or worse, a bunch of social network buttons, each in its own image file, is another example of email malpractice. Bandwidth may no longer be a factor, but adding a graphic file forces the recipient to receive some completely useless bits and also confuses potential future searches when trying to locate attachments. The correct thing to do is add at the end, in text mode, the contact details of the sender, be it telephone, address or whatever, but without graphics.
If the marketing department insists that the logo is cute, that they have spent a lot of money on the design and that you have to take it out for a walk on all possible occasions, tell them to come up with better marketing ideas, for example tattooing it on every employee’s forehead.
Email is a tool that in a very short time has become pretty much our main means of communication. Some practices have persisted over the years simply out of inertia: nobody ever questions their usefulness. We should be very careful about how we use email and only use it when it’s really necessary, and avoid practices that can be annoying and waste people’s time. Every now and then, a rethink about how we do things isn’t a bad idea.
(En español, aquí)
