The Single Most Important Email Communication Tactic

Elizabeth LaForce is a healthcare project manager with 20+ years of experience in hospital-based and ambulatory care operations. She has proven successful impacting operational performance, demonstrated through execution of successful projects resulting in positively impacted metrics. Elizabeth specializes in opening and operationalizing new healthcare facilities and clinical quality initiatives.

  Communications Management  

Project managers are the great communicators, aren’t we?

Many project managers will admit that getting responses and decisions often feels painfully challenging. Not getting those answers can seriously hinder your project—or even worse, draw it to a stop. This is why it is so important to hone in on those tactics and skills that can keep communication fluid.  

Email is not always (perhaps even not often) the best way to interact, but it can be useful—especially regarding questions and topics for which you don't need an immediate response. It shows some respect to those with whom you are interacting in the sense that you are not calling or sending a direct message to ask trivial questions or for non-urgent information in the middle of a busy workday.

Email is also very useful to manage the timing of communication. We've all had those late-night thoughts about whether that last piece of equipment you sent through to Purchasing was approved, or whatever other task or need pops into your head. Putting it in an email and saving it in the drafts folder (or setting it for delayed delivery for first thing in the morning) is possibly one of the best things you can do for the recipient and yourself. It's off your plate, somewhere you can track it, and the person to whom you are planning on sending it isn't going to receive it at 1 a.m., …

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