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Dr Monica Seeley - 353 found.The ‘Gove email-gate’ media disaster looms large. Micheal Gove is being accused of using a personal email account for Government business. Is it a breach of the law? Is it right or wrong to use a personal email account to transact Government business?
It has long been a serious concern for senior civil servants that MPs (and local Councillors) forward email to their personal email accounts. Interestingly, the concerns have normally focused on breaches of security rather than the FoI Act. Whether Mr Gove is breaching the law will depend on the terms of the Education Department’s computer acceptable usage policy (AUP) and whether or not he is bound by then (as in has he read and agreed to them). What is of concern is that he like others before him still have not learnt the lesson from other high profile email disasters and continue to put in an email communications which would be far better conveyed by other means such as a conversation.
If you don’t want the press to see what you have said – don’t put it in an email. It is that simple.
MPs and Councillors are notorious for their misuse of email and landing themselves and their Departments and Councils in trouble (think of Jo Moore and ‘a good time to bury bad news’). They can never make the time to attend any email best practice education session which might save them and their organisations significant time and money.
Now we are about to witness yet another waste of public time and money over the ‘Gove email-gate’ disaster.
Tags: email best practice, email security, Government cuts
Managing Email Overload and using brilliant email etiquette can save you up to one hour a day. We have posted many blogs about how to reclaim this extra hour. Last week we spoke and exhibited at the very successful Office* 2011. Attendance was up by 18% on the inaugural show last year.
We asked visitors to our stand and participants at our Brilliant Email Master Classs what they would do with an extra hour a day. Here are the top five responses;
1. Sleep
2. Go to the gym
3. Pamper myself (eg have a manicure)
4. Go home early
5. Meet friends for coffee
In this current era of self-indulgence and me, me, me there was one respone which was top of our list. It was ‘I’d like to dedicate it to me time, but rather than take, I would give back (my time) to charity.’ We all have different pressures on us and perhaps not all of us has that extra, extra time to give back.
However, whatever your choice it is clear that if we could all spend a little less time chained to our inbox by managing the email overload a little better we could lead slightly healthier lives.
My thanks to everyone who participated in this survey. What would you do with a spare hour a day?
Tags: email best practice, email etiquette, email overload
Do you want to save time and frustration dealing with a team inbox (such as the PA and Boss, project@, sales@ etc)?
Managing a team inbox can be fraught with problems and mistakes are costly. Email overload is rife. Frequent challenges are that emails get overlooked, conversely some are answered twice. There is often no clear process for what, how and which emails are retained. If they do exist not everyone with access to the inbox either understands or adheres to them.
With no clear processes about how to manage a team inbox the chances are that there is a high proportion of unnecessary emails but no one feels they can take ownership and take steps to reduce the waste. To check how much time is being wasted use our Cost of Email Misuse Calculator.
Basex found it costs about $100 to produce a page of information: not being able to find the appropriate email can be expensive.
Do these problem sound familiar especially to those PAs and EAs who manage their boss’s inbox and team leaders with project inbox?
Use our new Team Inbox Checklist to benchmark and improve how you manage such team inboxes. Download it now from the Mesmo Consultancy Knowledge Exchange. It will help you and your team reduce the level of email overload and email stress.
Do you have some tips to share with others?
Tags: Team inbox
Careless emails are the fastest way to expose a love affair. Recently seeing ‘Betrayal’ by Harold Pinter’s play reminded me of this fact. The nub of the story, as the title suggests, is about people having affairs and betraying each other. Based on his own affair with Joan Bakewell, it takes place in the late 70s when email as we know it was almost non-existant. The couples involved managed to keep their affairs secret for years.
Would that happen now in the digital era with email and social networking making it so easy to expose what one is doing? Take for example the Harry Stonecipher affair which is perhaps the most high profile and costly one to be exposed by careless email conversations and poor email etiquette. Before the era of email always on, this would probably have gone unnoticed and perhaps petered out.
More recently is the case of the late Mike Todd Chief Constable of Greater Manachester Police where again much of the evidence was found through email exchanges with the various women in his life. Again these exchanges were carried out on the company rather than personal emails accounts.
Women are often accused of gossiping more than men. If you look at the root source of most of the email scandals such as the Claire Swire’s affair they are nearly always perpetrated by men. My own research on gender differences shows that poor email etiquette in terms of gossiping by electronic communications is higher amongst men than women (see ‘Managing in the Email Office’).
In all likelihood the UK law on email retention will change over the coming year to be more like the US laws whereby email must be retained for a certain length of time. This will make it even harder to cover one’s tracks if the exchanges of love letters are on the company email account.
Perhaps it’s time to return to writing conventional love letters and at the very least improving one’s email etiquette when sending emails on the company email account.
What is your view on email love letters?
This weeks tips are how to write email PEARLS and not lead balloons which will land you and the business in trouble.
Tags: email best practice, email etiquette
How often do you feel people leave you sufficient time to respond to an email? Results from client projects suggest nearly half of us feel that people do not leave sufficient time to respond properly.
To participate in the full survey with a chance to win a free copy of ‘Brilliant Email’ – click on this link ‘Time to Respond’ survey.
Not being left suffient time to respond can be quite challenging especially when a substantive response is needed which requires thought and perhaps some background research. Why do we leave other people so little time to respond? Is it:
Whatever the reason, unreasonable expectations up the email stress on the person of whom we ask for a quick response. Further the pressure to responde often results in costly mistakes. For example, we admit to errors, give wrong facts, commit to deadlines and tasks which are not achievable etc.
What can be done to change the culture and make time for people to give an adequate reliable response? First and foremost, ask yourself how long it would take you to respond. Now double it (as we always over estimate our personal abilities) and that is the time you need to allow the other person to respond. That is good email etiquette.
Second as the recipient, to take the heat out of the situation, decide how quickly you can respond and if it is not within a working day, tell the sender. Tell them when you will respond. Don’t ask if it’s OK. You decide and set the time frame. Again use good email etiquette to manage the situation.
Third as a sender check people availablity beforehand and agree what is a reasonable response time.
For more tips and hints on ways to leave time for the recipient and as the recipient take the pressure off you to respond, follow me on Twitter.
Meanwhile what are your favourite tips on how to reduce the email overload and email stress created by those who expect an instant response?
Tags: email best practice, email etiquette, email overload, email stress