Email – Is it an effective communication tool in the workplace?

 This technology boom has compelled every organisation to have an organisational email facility for its employees. Further more, organisations have gone a step further in creating a customised and personalised domain name to suit their organisation.

Imagine a world without emails !!!!!!!!!!!!

The fact of organisational commitment and investment required for an email server or to host in a remote server are considered to be a constant. With every other thing frozen as a constant, let’s try to analyse if emails have been a boon or bane to the workplace.

 

Effective communication is a key to the success of a project. With the advancements in technology, there is more and more reliance on electronic communication. It assists project managers in mass communication of information among the team. Tools such as MS outlook are becoming a synonym of email. Such tools have been developed with user friendly features such as calendar sharing, marking the importance of the message, booking resources, reoccurring meetings.

 

Advancement in technology and move of organisation towards a cost optimisation has lead to the rise of outsourcing of work and formation of virtual project teams. Spread apart and across the globe the employees function as a team. The key flavour to the increase in this type of work culture is the increase reliance towards electronic communication. It breaks thru the barriers of time difference in different parts of the world, enables immediate communication of information to any where in the world and avoids the need for time consuming costly face-to-face meetings. 

Emails have become part of every day’s, work, this over reliance on technology, is this good or bad. Emails help in validation of source of information and as a tool to maintain an audit trail. 

Audit Trail !!!

Research has shown that, “Emails addiction” is one of the most stressful and challenging task for a manager to handle, both personally and of their team. Electronic communication has hindered the need for face-to-face communication. This could have a negative impact, such as, that it deteriorates the growth of interpersonal skills.

 

As a Project Manager or Manager, it is important to balance the communication among your team. Moving forward into this challenging world, it is best to identify stakeholder, team and project need and define a particular mode of communication as part of the project communication plan.

 In my opinion, emails could be used for communicate and share project information. However for personal and when making decision, with impact to the project, face-to-face communication is better.

 ** In near future I expect to write about use of mobile devices for emails and about effect of email spam**

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