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When will everyone understand that email and social media communications never disappear into the ether? And why don’t we realise that our emails provide an instant and probably permanent picture of us, our culture and our business office? Good email etiquette is as vital as managing the risk of a breach of security and compliance as discussed recently on the BBC Today programme.
Today, even if we delete an incriminating email or one we’d rather forget – it will still be sitting on some server somewhere or in a ‘cloud’ waiting to rain down disaster at any time up to decades later.
This is particularly the case if your company is linked to the financial, legal, public or professional services world. We all have to keep records for a minimum of six years and in regulated environments like finance and commerce, communications are often retained for ….ever and can be requested as evidence.
Sadly, history keeps repeating itself as I’ve been writing for over a decade about extremely avoidable ‘emailgate’ type disasters. From ‘Govegate’, to Microsoft antitrust, Merrill Lynch, Norwich Union (in 1977), BP emails revealing lying about the oil leakage and putting cost cutting before safety, to the recent memorable and revealing emails and texts exchanged by executives, editors, MPs and even prime ministers called to appear at the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking at the News of the World. But top of the mind is Barclays, the latest large corporate brought down by inappropriate use of email.
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“Dude, I owe you big time! Come over one day after work and I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger,” was seductive and highly conversational. Not really the terms and phrases you’d expect for something so important and highly sensitive as fixing the interbank lending rates. Indeed Traders made their requests in person, via email and through electronic “chats” over an instant messaging system with little concern about the content, tone or image they were leaving behind.
And that’s the point. Neither they or their organisation probably ever considered that their words would or could be broadcast worldwide several years after they were written. Even if they had deleted the communications they would still exist somewhere and could be retrieved. The damage caused by casual communication is not just to the image of the individuals involved but can take years and large amounts of funds to rebuild the confidence of customers and the markets in which they operate.
What Barclays did was wrong. Poor use of email and email etiquette just made the evidence easier to find. Perhaps it’s time for ‘slow email’ and more guidance on how email is used in the decision making process?
Tags: corporate email etiquette, email best practice, email etiquette dos and don'ts, email etiquette rules, email etiquette training
Email overload rules according to a new survey by Mircosoft. We spend more time dealing with email than socialising with friends and family. The survey revealed that on average we waste two hours a week dealing with ‘greymail’. That is email we don’t really need. Research by Mesmo Consultancy finds the time wasted to be a little higher – nearer five hours a day.
The average inbox receives about 14,6000 per year. Again we find it too be higher and nearer 22,630. Not clear whether or not the Microsoft data relates to business or social use of email. Nonetheless it underlines the need to deal swiftly with the whole email addiction and email overload syndrome.
To check how much time you are personally wasting use our Cost of Email Misuse Calculator
What is especially worrying is that many young people feel so stressed by email overload. It also conflicts with the view that social networking is taking over from email as the main communications channel.www.mesmo.co.uk
Over the years at Mesmo Consultancy have developed the Nine Ps of Smart Email Management Charter to help people reduce the email overload and email stress. Feel free to download it and use it.
If you need more help, why not call contact me about our Smart Email Management workshops and coaching sessions?
Tags: email best practice, email charter, email overload, Microsoft
We are publishing the 100th edition of the Mesmo Consultancy ‘e-briefing’ – tips and hints on how to save time by reducing email overload and using brilliant email etiquette. The first edition appeared on 1st January 2003 and was emailed to 350 subscribers. 100 editions on and we have over 2,300 subscribers.
How has email changed over the last ten years since the first edition?
SPAM dominated discussion on email. There were government conferences on it. Company boards were blamed as they did not recognise the need to take control and enforce proper Acceptable Usage Policies. In 2011 the resources needed to process the current volume of SPAM are sufficient to drive 1.6 million times around the world.
Phones4U made headlines as employees were banned from using email for internal communication and their MD said this would save them £1M per year. Here we go again in 2012 with Atos trying to find alternatives to email for internal communications.
Royal Mail found that poor business etiquette was costing companies £4bn in lost customers. Poor email etiquette is now just as costly judging from some of our clients’ woes.
The Audit Commissioners found that IT fraud and abuse was posing major problems to public sector organisations. New technologies, like the use of handheld devices (PDAs) and wireless networking, are creating fresh risks to which public services are only slowly reacting.
There was a rise in the sales of traditional writing instruments according to research analysts. One teacher was so fed up with text speak that she ordered her pupils to write only with a fountain pen.
Hands up all those who still use a fountain pen – especially to say ‘thank you’?
Email overload and time wasted on the Internet were starting to become an issue. A Government survey estimated that people wasted two days per year ‘wilfing’ – aimlessly surfing the net. Now we estimate business people waste up to nearly two days per month dealing with unnecessary email.
Email addiction is becoming a problem for Blackberry users. In 2011 the Blackberry outage served to highlight just how serious email addiction has now become. It is one of the biggest drains on employee’s health and causes of stress related illness.
Twitter takes off and we launched our daily email tips under the EmailDoctor pseudonym. Some were starting to suggest that the use of email would decline in the face of rising use of social networking. See Social Networking in Business 2009.
Email overload continues to dominate the news with some declaring email bankruptcy. Cyber crime costs more than physical crime. There are an estimated 2M emails sent per second worldwide. In personal terms it equates to about 72 email messages received per person per day which is about one new email every ten minutes! Now research analysts estimate a rise to 80+ by 2015.
There are now several websites dedicated to reviewing conventional note books and writing instruments!
Does history repeat itself? Yes, just like fashion, where drain pipe trousers are succeed by flairs and then straight cuts and then back around the loop. Mini skirts come and go and for some they were called ‘pelmets’. In suits it’s double breasted then single breasted are all the rage.
Indeed for some of us of a certain age ‘Cloud Computing’ feels just like ‘Bureau Services’. Ah but many of you are far too young to have heard that term.
So hold onto a few of these challenges and make a diary not about how you resolved them because you may well need to look back in anger five years down the line!
Tags: email addiction, email and the cloud, email best practice, email carbon footprint, email etiquette, email overload
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Tags: email and the cloud, email best practice, email overload
But what about the best of the worst. Here are two which made me laugh.
I’m off skiing until Monday January 23, and won’t be checking my emails unless (a) the eurozone finally wheezes its last or (b) all the pistes are all closed and I get really bored. If it’s urgent, though, try contacting ….
Joe (an alias) is up north delivering a workshop on pitching and won’t be checking emails regularly. If it is urgent please call on …. See you soon Joe.
I ask you what image do you now have of these two people?
Very personally I am not interested in what the person is doing, simply that they are not there should I need them. But maybe I am just an old fashioned girl!
When will people realise just how much information they give away through their Out-of-Office message and lax email etiquette?
Tags: email best practice, email etiquette, out-of-office messages