In our information overload study we often hear that email is a major problem. When I hear this I wonder, what is actually the problem: is it the volume of email people receive, the unclearness of the message (why did they mail this to me, the cc-culture), or is it the pressure that people feel (I have to react now, or the cc to the manager). Yesterday I read a very interesting paper by Anthony Burgett, Thomas Jackson and Janet Edwards who describe the email problems (defects) in more detail and present a solution: email training.
The paper titled "Email training significantly reduces email defects" appeared inJournal of Information Management (paper in PDF, subscription needed). The defects the authors found in a large organisation relate to the quality of the emails:
- information deficiency (poorly written, context unclear)
- poorly targeted emails (inappropriate use of cc-function)
- media selection (other medium would be more appropriate)
- interruption (distracters from work)
- processing and filing of email (prioritise and manage messages, trouble retrieving messages for later use)
The funny thing is that most employees are not trained in writing email. Ok, they receive support with the functionality of the tool but usually not with the message itself. The paper describes training for sender of email, which consists of showing examples of poor emails and asking to pick out the defects. I expected more an instruction here, "How to write a proper email message". Besides that, senders were trained how to better manager their email by using folders and archiving (which is more a receiver problem to me). After the training, a test shows that the two major improvements were:
* better use of the subject line which makes it easier to prioritise an email and also to assess the content (99% significant);
* better written emails which were easier to read and to the point (95% significant).
So, even a very simple training (studying examples) gives such good results. Sounds very easy to try out ourselves.
Another part of the research (relation email defects to job grade, age and duration) I did not mention here, will do that later.
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