Live Life Team
When you’re working with a shared email system it’s more important than ever to have clear rules and a practical approach to management. You can’t afford to have messages overlooked because everyone thinks someone else is dealing with them, and it looks unprofessional if more than one person responds to the same message, as well as wasting time. These tips will help you to avoid problems and to organize your shared email effectively.
Be clear about who deals with what
In many workplaces, email duties can be organized by subject, with particular people assigned to look after particular types of message. In others, individual team members build up personal connections with regular correspondents and it’s useful to prioritize those. Still others need to focus on speed and have messages dealt with as soon as possible after they arrive. Whichever approach to email management your workplace uses, it’s important that everyone understands it and that you have established means of dealing with any uncertainty about who should deal with particular messages.
Move messages into individual action folders
Once the right person has found a message, moving it into their own personal action folder means that nobody else is going to double up on it by mistake. After being moved, messages should be dealt with as quickly as possible, but their presence in separate folders means that where required they can wait until required work has been carried out first, such as the completion of a report that needs to be attached to a reply. As well as folders for individuals to work on, it’s useful to have an additional folder for messages that are already in hand but which everybody needs to read.
Tag messages in shared folders
Where it’s not practical to move messages straightaway, they can be tagged whilst still in the inbox, with most systems allowing users to color code them or to attach symbols. That means that if, for instance, a message is opened by the wrong person, it can be flagged up as appropriate for somebody else (or one of a group of other people), but because it isn’t actually moved into an action folder, nobody’s to do list will grow without warning. This approach can also be used in other shared folders such as those dedicated to particular projects.
Agree on archiving rules
Just as it’s important to have clear rules around how messages are moved into action folders, it’s important to agree on how they’re archived. There are two aspects to this. Firstly, it’s important that archiving takes place often enough to prevent clutter but not until everyone has actually finished with a particular message. Secondly, it’s important for everyone to be able to find old messages if they need them for reference in the future. In busy workplaces with a high email turnover, knowing where to look can enable faster recovery than relying on global searches.
These simple strategies enable you to process incoming email efficiently and to keep shared systems running smoothly.
