Fulcrum Consulting

Fulcrum Consulting

Smart Email Management

Background

Fulcrum Consulting is a leading international firm of multidisciplinary consulting engineers, delivering fully integrated design of building services, infrastructure, building design and built fabric solutions ensuring minimal environmental impact.

At the forefront of controlled innovation and risk management, Fulcrum research and identify suitable technologies and companies to enable them to provide high quality and exemplar designs promoting added value for their clients.

Challenge — oversize mailboxes slowed down the systems

Each project has its own mailbox and a Secretary responsible for its management. However, it was becoming impossible to keep on top of the volume of emails many of which were not essential, eg duplicates, old newsletters, thank you notes, jokes etc. Mailboxes were becoming oversized and causing the system to run slowly and systems outages were not uncommon. Getting engineers to move important emails from their personal mailbox to the project mailbox was also a challenge.

For a consultancy practice like Fulcrum time is money and slow email systems meant taking more time than necessary to do even a simple task. This was time which could not be re-charged to the client and was thus an unnecessary added overhead.

Mesmo Consultancy was called in to help educate and train users to reduce the volume of email traffic and in particular the unnecessary ‘noise’ eg jokes and thank you notes. The goal was to slim down mailboxes so that not only could Secretary’s keep on top of the project mailboxes and quickly find key emails, but also improve the stability of the whole mail system.

Solution

Initially seventy five percent of the organisation were trained in Mesmo Consultancy’s Nine Ps of Smart Email Management (from Directors to Receptionist). As Fulcrum expanded and grew rapidly, new joiners were trained and a series of advanced workshops were provided. These advanced sessions were tailored to Fulcrum’s way of working and covered the use of the calendar, task list and contacts.

A new electronic document management system was also implemented. The follow-up sessions were used as well to prepare people for this new system and new ways of collaborative working.

Results/outcome

After the training programme users are spending fifteen to forty five minutes a day less dealing with their email: a saving of at least half a day per month. People ‘have reduced the number of emails they feel they need to handle during the day. Secretary’s and project managers feel much more in control of their mailboxes.’ ‘By adopting some key principles of good email housekeeping, it is easier to find important emails as people no longer keep all emails in their personal mailbox.’ The engineers move key emails to the project mailbox and file them properly. The stability of the system has increased and outages are dramatically reduced.’

These efficiency gains were achieved as people started to delete emails which were not needed as a formal record, handled each email once and dealt with it properly, copied in only those who really needed to know, and reduced the number of times they dipped in to their mailbox.

Communications too improved across teams as people become less email centric and started to talk again.

Why Mesmo/Monica Seeley?

Monica’s approach to training is very popular and users are able to identify with examples provided which helped to generate positive results for the user and company.

Mesmo is very loyal to existing clients and will go that extra mile to ensure as a company you are getting the type of workshops relevant to your business/problems including good value for money. We would definitely use Mesmo again if the opportunity arose .