Although email is one of the main communication medium for business nowadays, many internal emails are lacking of some basic etiquette. This usually result in lots of noise, some misunderstandings and loss of valuable time.
I would like to mention a couple of methods I use which I learned during my 10+ years of work life. Possibly there are more best practices which I will learn in the upcoming years.
Every morning I skim through my inbox without opening any mails and I am focusing on two components from and subject. When the subject of the email is clear I can mentally label and prioritize it accordingly. When the subject is vague, the email is automatically deprioritized and moved into the Others\unimportant mailbox then wait there until I finish catching up all higher priority tasks.
What I do in subject line when I am writing emails; First of all I attach a classification if necessary like IMPORTANT, ACTION REQUIRED or ANNOUNCEMENT, INFO this help receivers to identify the email’s purpose. Then I summarize the topic as clear as possible like Meeting Minutes from 12.12.12 or Database downtime due to maintenance.
With these two components email receivers can easily identify the importance of the email and how the topic is related to them.
For long emails after the greeting part I directly add a tldr, sometimes it is the call to action, sometimes it is the very short (usually one sentence) summary of the following information.
Then I continue with the more details, reasoning behind etc. So receivers can just read one sentence and decide if they want to read more. So they can save their valuable time.
Reply all is noisy and dangerous.
Sometimes there are emails sent to a mailing list. Those can be announcements, farewells, etc. When you click to reply all on those emails your email reaches to tens of people sometimes even thousands depending on the size of mailing list. When a couple of people hits the reply all, it creates noise. It can also create a load for the email servers which happened in github a few months ago.
It is also dangerous, because sometimes this mailing lists also includes external parties. E.g. when there is an announcement of a new version of software this announcement can be relatable to external contractors etc. but if someone hits reply all and starts to discuss about license cost for example then internal information can leak to outside.
What I do to avoid this; First of all I check the to and cc parts of the email, if all the people in these fields are necessary then I hit reply all, otherwise I hit reply and add necessary people manually.
This is a followup topic to the one above. As the original poster you can avoid noise by using the bcc.
How I use it; Whenever there is an announcement that should be sent to a huge group of people, I put these email lists in bcc, then I put our team email in to field. So if they reply all only our team will be notified not all the people.
There is a second scenario where I use bcc, when some superiors of me wants to be informed about the status of a project or task. Sometimes I put them in bcc so (1) they are informed (2) original receiver of the email does not see it and does not think I escalated the task. It is not escalated at all.
Time to time it is required to add new parties into discussion. It can be a related team or a related person to a task.
Whenever this occurs I always write it in the first sentence of email body, like I am adding John and Jane, as their comment is required on the topic. So it is explicit that I added new people, and new people know why they are added to the thread.
There can be times when everything goes south and you become upset with the progress. In those times it is dangerous to hit the send in my opinion. Although this is completely dependant on one’s character, under pressure one can write in a mood which is unnecessarily angry\upset\blaming etc.
I use drafts for that, I write the email to avoid any accidents I don’t put anything into to\cc\bcc parts so email can not be sent. And I write the body, then next hours or in the next days I revisit the draft, soften the sharp edges then send it.
During my 10+ year tenure in the business, I made mistakes each mistake was also an opportunity to learn and become better. When it comes to email I learnt the points above and most important two for me are the (1) do no send the email when you are upset, and (2) avoid hitting reply all. They caused some headaches to me in the past, and you can avoid this headaches by learning from my experience.
Thanks for reading so far, please add your suggestions in the comments. And here some more related posts I wrote in the past.