Team email management
Monday March 21st, 2011, 9:30 am
When a team manages an inbox what is best way to ensure every email is dealt with and keep track of outstanding actions (for example boss’s; sales@;info@) Here are some top tips on team email management.
Team Inbox Management
The PA/EA and manager relationship is always interesting if only because few talk about how best to handle the email. For example:
- Who is responsible for filing and deleting old email?
- What is the best way for each party to draw to the other person’s attention emails which still need action, printing etc?
- How do you cope when the boss dips in and out?
- What is the process for telling their PA/EA what action either has or has not been taken?
- How much time is the PA/EA wasting simply deleting emails which they know is of no interest to their manager?
Here are three simple tips for team email management to save some time and reduce the email overload.
- Agree who is ultimately responsible for managing the inbox, eg filing retention, archiving etc.
- Work out a process for highlighting emails which have been dealt with and those which still need attention, eg flags, a ‘traffic light’ folder structure, even edit the email itself.
- Audit the volume of incoming email and discuss how to reduce it based on what is automatically deleted.
What are your top tips for handling a team inbox?
For more time saving tips and hints why not
buy a copy of one of our books or let us run a
Smart Email Management workshop for you and your colleagues.
Tags: email best practice, email management, email overload, Team email management, Team inbox
We are using http://unifiedinbox.com to manage all our team mail. It's been a complete change to what we used to do but we're very happy with it as we can now filter messages individually assigned to each other and also comment internally.