Before 10am, your inbox fills with at least 1 email per minute. Early morning meetings are dread because of the overflow of garbage emails you have to spend the next hour going through, even if the meeting you just walked out of was the rare” highly productive and motivational” type and you were inspired to jump onto those needed next steps.
By the time you’ve made it through your inbox, you’re frustrated and exhausted… and all but 1 or 2 of those pre-10am emails came from your co-workers. If this is your usual Monday, Tuesday, or everyday, you’re using email wrong as an organization.
Reasons why intra-office email is unproductive:
Inbox overload: your inbox fills with spam, customer/b2b messages, and with the addition of questions and requests by co-workers, ALL get diluted in the mix. You miss important customer/b2b requests, buried in all that other garbage, even if you have good spam filters.
Inbox fatigue: the sheer volume of emails drives you to put away email to only check it occasionally, delaying responses to everyone.
Poor threading: how many emails have been forwarded by your co-workers that are just a chain of RE: RE: RE: RE:, and now you have to scroll through repeated messages over and over to pick out any new bit of information to understand what is going on. This wastes 3-5 times the amount of your time.
CC spam: every input or reply to a chain where you are on CC is just more emails in your inbox when your input is not needed.
Accidental horror-show: when an internal communication accidentally gets shared with external customers/b2b because they were buried in the TO or CC lines and you or your co-worker didn’t realize this. This can be legally dangerous, or at least embarrassing.
Solution:
For intra-office communication, get a collaboration/work chat tool and establish a clear-cut policy that there need to be 2 separate channels for communication:
- Internal communication should exist solely on this collaboration/work chat platform
- Email should be used only for communication involving customers/b2b
Having email used only for communication involved with external customers/b2b makes sure that everyone know that customers/b2b are involved, preventing the “accidental horror-show”. It also makes email have a new priority in communication, eliminating Inbox overload and Inbox fatigue.
Internal collaboration/work chat comes with Status identifiers that allows your co-workers to know when you are available for immediate response and when you are not. These tools also have much better threading, and help eliminate or minimize CC spam, by allowing back and forth communications to be single-thread only and with alerts for when your attention or input is directly needed.
Most offices are employing some kind of Project Management platform for larger projects and productivity. This is good for those specific projects, but not for general intra-office communications.
Good tools
| Slack | Slack has been growing into the most commonly-used workplace collaboration and chat tool, including calls and videos for remote meetings |
| Fleep | Solid internal communication platform with threaded discussions, file sharing, etc. and has a “tasks” feature for managing requests and follow up without a full project management component |
| Flowdock | Flowdock ties directly into email and can help separate internal chat communications from customer/b2b emails and route those into various project management platforms |
| Stride | This tool combines chat, file sharing, and tasks with light project management. If your office is using other Atlassian products, like Jira for project management, this is the better tool for you |
| Microsoft Teams | If your office is a full “Microsoft Shop”, this is the tool for you as it fully integrates with Office 365 and OneDrive |
| Google Hangouts | If your office is a “Google Workplace”, this is the tool for you as it integrates with Gmail and Google Drive |
*please note: the tools listed above and descriptions are only an opinion and recommendation to evaluate. This list does not imply any specific preference and NSB Insights has no partnership with any of these companies.
If your business is interested in help with finding the right solution for you, please Contact Us. We are happy to act as your “buyer’s agent” and will help find/integrate the solution you need.