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Top tips from Mesmo Consultancy (and Associates) on how to save time and improve business and personal performance by ‘Taking Control of your Inbox’ and using proper business email etiquette.
Here are our top five tips to help you relax and reduce the risk of cyber crime happening to either you or your business for example, identity theft, denial of service, loss of sensitive data and home burglary etc. The key is to disconnect but if you find that hard then be discrete about what you say and post.
For some more suggestions on how reduce email overload overload and to take time our from the digital world and especially from email click here to see my latest blog on Huffington.co.uk. The article also contains ways to re-balance your work-life balance and reduce stress.
If all else fails you might want to check your level of email addiction click here to start. At Mesmo Consultancy have helped may business people reduce their level of email addiction and improve their work-life balance. Call us for an informal discussion about how we can help you.
Tags: cyber crime, email addiction, email overload, Huffington.co.uk, Mesmo Consultancy
What does bad email etiquette cost you? This question was prompted by the wonderful story yesterday of a French Café who charge polite customers less for coffee. This generated a request from BBC Radio Solent’s Julian Clegg to talk about whether or not manners maketh man. (Interestingly, a quote from Willian Wykeham Bishop of Winchester around 1366)
Coincidentally, yesterday too I was asked if it was acceptable to reply to an internal email without including a salutation. All Mesmo Consultancy’s research shows that if you add a salutation and a few polite words you are more likely to receive a reply from the other person than an email with just a one line question. For example ‘ Please can you let me have the sales figures. Thanks’ will engage the other person more than the bald statement ‘Let me have the sales figures’.
This is perhaps not surprising in the digital age where physical interactions are on the decline and we come to rely increasingly on digital interaction. How we write emails and social media posts is our ‘e-dress code’. It portrays a picture of you for better or worse.
Email etiquette which Mesmo Consultancy finds conveys a bad image include:
In the lean world of business, we need to draw out the best in the people with whom we work. Displaying arrogance in our emails and social media posts in not an option. Moreover in such a noisy world we also need both to make ourselves stand out and find ways to work with those who prefer ‘Quiet’. Good email etiquette can help. Good email etiquette costs you nothing (well maybe a few seconds more to write the email) but helps you gain friends rather than enemies.
Use our free on-line ‘Email Etiquette’ benchmarking tool to see what image you create and how well you engage through email with others. Still need some help than ask us about how our corporate email etiquette training which has helped others can help you win more business.
Tags: BBC Radio Solent, corporate email etiquette, email et, email etiquette, email salutations, Julian Clegg, Mesmo Consultancy
Email disaster happen time and time again. Over fifteen years of writing two books on email best practice and many articles, not surprisingly I have files full of email media disasters from the early stories of naughty Claire Swire emails to the more serious ones where Kirsty Walk asked her PA to hack into someone else’s inbox to retrieve some damaging emails.
When will we learn that no matter how hard we try to erase an email we wish we had never sent, someone will have a copy. Furthermore as we become increasingly litigiousness many
organisation now archive all email traffic in and out of their servers. Two press stories prompted me to write again on this topic. First, there is the phone hacking trial in which copious evidence is email related. At one point the management team tried to destroy all old emails only to find not surprisingly that they had been archived by their mail provider.
Second, was the recent email trail between Ed Miliband and a senior aide which branded Ed Balls as a ‘nightmare’. This was a classic case of not only putting something stupid into an email but then compounding the felony by sending it to the wrong person!
What can we do to avoid such email scandals which seem to now occur regularly? Recall the email. No that doesn’t work as I now have it and am intrigued why you are recalling it.
Here are my top three tips:
Most people feel compelled to either reply instantly they receive a new email or fire off an email when feeling cross. This usually results in unnecessary emails chains which often spiral into email wars and drive up the email overload. There is a time and place for chatting and gossip but email is not that place.
Do you want to reduce the risk that someone in your organisation will make an email faux pass? Call us now and ask about how our Brilliant Email Management masterclass can help you and your organisation prevent such email disasters (which are often very expensive in terms of damage limitation PR and putting people on gardening leave).
Meanwhile, dare to share, what are your tips for avoiding an email disaster? Have you ever been subject such an email scandal?
Tags: email disasters, email management training, email overload, email scandals
Experience is simply the name we give to our mistakes. Oscar Wilde
Over the last few weeks running email management and email etiquette workshops, many of you have shared some classic faux pas. The spell checker is great for those of us who cannot spell but it can lead to some real howlers if you don’t watch what is happening. Here are a few from recent Brilliant Email management training sessions:
‘Hell’ was the email greeting instead of ‘Hello’.
The Board were asked to line up their ‘dicks’ instead of their ducks’ ahead of a board meeting.
Visitors were asked what size ‘willie’ would they like rather than ‘wellington’ boots.
The IT department apologised in advance of weekend maintenance for the ‘incontinence’ rather than ‘inconvenience’.
The moral of these email faux pas is not only to think before hitting send, but watch carefully as you spell check your email. Paying attention, pays dividends when it comes to email etiquette and preserving your image – both your own and the company’s.
Dare to share email mistakes like these either that have been sent to you or you have sent to others? Copy of ‘Brilliant Email’ for the best one.
Tags: email etiquette, email howlers, email management training, email mistakes, Oops
A couple of weeks or ago I had the pleasure and honour of running a Brilliant Email Management workshop for over one hundred NHS PAs at the NHS PAs for Excellence Wales conference. Here are their top tips for reducing email overload and using excellent email etiquette to save time.
What would you add as your favorite tip?
Tags: Brilliant Email, email etiquette, email overload, email rules, email subject line, NHS PAs for Excellence, Twenty five top tips