Email will play a vital role in communication throughout the duration of your project. You’ll use it to communicate with both onsite and remote team members, with executives, with stakeholders and with a tremendous range of other individuals involved in the project in some way. While email is a powerful tool, it must be used correctly in order to be effective. Follow these best practices to ensure that your communication is accurate, timely and that best practices are followed by everyone on the team.
Cut Out Extraneous Text
When replying to an email, it’s important that you keep the subject matter from the previous message for reference. However, this can quickly snowball into an unwieldy thing, particularly if you’re using something like the Gmail interface for your communications in which you have to scroll to the very bottom of the email string to start your reply. If possible, start a new email, but you should at least try to limit the email trail to just the previous message (though this can very if there’s important information later in the string).
Fully Document Upcoming Meetings
Chances are good you’re going to email your team members about mandatory meetings. However, it’s imperative that you resist the urge to simply lay out the date, time and location of the meeting. Do your team a favor and list the agenda you’ll follow throughout the meeting, detailing the topics of discussion. This provides them with the time to prepare, as well as to come up with any questions they might have regarding the topics of discussion. If you will be reviewing documents, attach copies of each to the email when you send it out. Finally, make sure you give your team advanced warning – sending out an email the day the meeting is scheduled isn’t going to do anyone any good.
Be Proactive about Slow Responses
If you’re sending out an email but anticipate that your responsible might be slow or delayed by several hours (you’re in a meeting of your own, for instance), let your team members know this up front. Don’t just send out the email and then ignore their replies – they need to know that you’re not actively ignoring them. Mention in your email that your responses will be slow because of whatever’s going on, and if possible, give a time when you expect to be free of other responsibilities.
Don’t Include Uninvolved People
There will be times that you need to send emails to specific team members, or that you need to reply to a few team members out of a thread listing everyone’s email address. Don’t hit “reply all” unless everyone on the list needs to be included in that reply. Automatically including everyone in a reply that’s only necessary for certain people clutters up others’ email boxes, but can also give out information that shouldn’t be shared with just everyone.
Email is a powerful tool. However, it has to be used correctly in order to ensure that your communication doesn’t suffer.