What’s Wrong With Email? Maybe It’s How You Use It...

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Communications Management   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

It was a glorious time when email first arrived. Admittedly, the products and interfaces that used it were somewhat laughable by today’s standards, but it was a wonderful realization to many of us who suddenly felt we had a voice that could reach everyone--and could do it without being circumvented by go-between processes and interfering subordinates.

Times change though, and so has our means to communicate. Nowadays, we seem to value shorter messages. It’s gotten so that posts of only 140 characters are supposed to make us feel conversational without being overloaded with too much content. Pundits have written that we put too much content into email and need to send less often to each other. Anyone who has been around a couple years in a business with an active communications environment will tell you that they get inundated with worthless and next-to-worthless notes, texts and IMs that waste their time rather than fulfill a business need. That being said, email does serve a very useful purpose--even those messages sent with robust content--and it is unfortunate that it has gotten such a bad rap.

Ideally, an email should be a condensed bit of information--no more than half a page if printed, definitely less than a whole page. The statements need to be “chunked” to some degree--even those emails that have formal introductions or announcements …

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