If there is one takeaway that we should thank Covid for it is that more and more companies are now permitting, and in many cases actively encouraging, their employees to work remotely. With this in mind, email communication has become an even more vital form of communication. In fact, it is one of the most common types of communication many organisations use. Sending emails is something that team members do most of the time, but it is a form of communication that is all too often prone to mistakes.
When it comes to composing an email, team members need to be careful; simple mistakes can, unfortunately, change the entire meaning of a message and how it is received. Here, we ask the experts at Parallel Project Management Training to put together our list of the top 5 mistakes you might be making.
1. Vague subject lines
When someone receives lots of emails during the working day, they are likely to scan the subject lines to see what they need to deal with. If your subject line is rather vague, there is a good chance that it will not attract their attention and may end up being ignored.
You only have a small space but make the information that you put in your subject line work for you, not against you.
2. Get the receiver’s name correct.
There is nothing guaranteed to annoy someone more in an email, particularly someone you work with all the time than their name being misspelt. We are not just talking about more complicated-to-spell names but simple ones as well. It is surprising just how often people do this. In many cases, it may simply be a typing error, but a quick scan of your emails before you send them should take care of this.
3. Think before using “Reply All”
There is nothing worse than a team member who uses the “Reply All” function to reply to an email that was sent to a large group of people, particularly if they are simply letting the sender know that they have received the email and are looking at it.
If the reply was actually only aimed at one person, there is the possibility that sending it to everyone could have problematic consequences. Once you have pressed “Reply All”, it is too late to get something back.
4. Marking everything “urgent”
One thing you will learn during PM Courses is that it is vital to prioritise your tasks so that the most important are dealt with, and the least important delegated. Marking all of your emails as urgent, particularly when they are not, means people will not take what you have sent seriously and leave it for later because you have done this too many times before. It’s a bit of a “the boy who cried wolf situation” because the one email that you send that is urgent is far more likely to be ignored.
5. The wrong recipient
The worst mistake you could be making is sending your email to the wrong person. If you are fortunate and it should simply have gone to another member of the team, the wrong recipient might forward it, but it does give a very bad impression.
Are you making any of these simple mistakes when e-mailing your team? It might be time to take another look at how you compose and handle your e-mails. It could make all the difference to your working relationships.
