Here are seven ways your email is crippling your team’s productivity, and what you can do to fix it.
1) Using Email Like a Chat Room
Email is great when it is one sender and one recipient talking about one specific topic. However, it is NOT designed in any way, shape, or form to be a chat window. When you rely on email for team discussions, you get these sorts of situations.
- Someone’s response gets lost in twenty responses of “yes”, “okay”, knock-knock jokes, and the secretary’s new gluten-free dessert recipe that the accounting department asked them for last week.
- Trying to find a specific response in an email chain 75 responses long.
- Confusion as to who does what and missed questions.
- Someone missing messages because someone didn’t hit “Reply all”
- Cringeworthy ‘Reply-All’ email responses that kill team and client rapport- and lead to HR nightmares.
When you want to collaborate with a team, it is better to use actual collaborative software. It is designed to organize multiple people, tasks, and documents.
2) Problems With Attachments
We have all had it happen at least once. Someone sends an email marked ‘Urgent” with a task they need in an hour, based on the attachment provided. No big deal. Until you realize that the attachment is completely incompatible with your current apps, printer, and hardware. Or worse, it was completely corrupted during the upload and sending process.
Cue the frantic back and forth, missed time frames, and a game of tag to try to correct the issue. All the while other projects start piling up as they wait their turn.
Email is great for a small word doc or a low-size pdf. However, both the email and the recipient’s hardware have their limits. To avoid file errors and other productivity killers, it’s best to make sure everyone has a unified system that will allow them to store, share, and archive files as needed.
3) Junk Mail
Your team likes to communicate through email; So does every spam bot, marketer, email subscription, and store promotion under the sun. In fact, 45.1% of all email sent in March of 2021 was spam. If you use email for team collaborations, you risk getting drowned out in the sea of coworker chatter and junk mail. Worse, if the email has a vague subject line, it could be difficult to find it later.
When you collaborate with your team, it is better to use a platform that is geared specifically to that task. That way you only see the relevant people and information without getting drowned out by 20% off promotions from your office supply store.
On top of that, say the wrong thing and your email will be tossed right into your client or co-worker’s spam box. Even common spam words like “Free,” “Urgent,” and “Terms and conditions” can kill your email before it is ever seen.
4) Clunky and Unreliable Layouts
Have you ever tried to embed a video or share a table with your project team, only to have it turn into a gibberish mess of scattered code and text? Email is great for simple messages, but it is not made to share rich media.
Even simple images can not be trusted to embed properly. If the other person has their settings to filter out images, it will show up as a broken link. If you have people that use other email platforms, you may see numerous rendering errors.
If you need to share rich media, tables, and other media with the team, it is better to use a platform made for the task.
5) No Workflows or Processes
Emails are not designed to track and visualize the big picture. To stay at top efficiency, you need more than scattered emails of instructions and memos- you need a full transparent set of processes, procedures, and work instructions all in one place.
Emails are not formatted to help you organize these various parts of the big picture effectively. Instead, you waste valuable time searching out emails to audit who was told what, who is responsible for which task, and inevitable tasks with redundancies and missing steps.
On top of that, you can not track and audit permissions, tasks, or problems areas via email. You have to waste time searching data, investigating issues, and tracking down each cog in the machine to find the problems. This leads to bottlenecks, missing steps, and confusion on who does what.
6) Finding the Right Email
Have you ever found yourself spending two hours wading through search terms and email archives to find that one message? When you use your email as a collaboration platform, you end up wasting hours, if not days, searching out every task, permission, and invoice involved in the process. This includes:
- Paperwork and DocuSigns
- PDFs of client needs
- Invoices
- Accounts receivables
- Memos to and from teams
- Affirmations
- Checking instructions for a process
- Feedback notes
- Attachments
- Untitled documents and messages
You can easily spend half a workday just scouring and organizing emails. The time that could be spent building your company and completing team objectives! If you want to maximize your productivity, use a platform made for storing, organizing, and sharing all these factors without detective work.
7) Emails Are Exhausting and Demotivating
According to one study, 38% of workers quit their job due to email fatigue.
Emails are an extra burden of constant communication on both employees and management. The poor design and frequent individual updates waste time and keep them on a frequent “on-call” status. Some even continue to get communications and requests for work off-hours and on vacation.
Pair that with the frustrations from the points above and you have a web of unproductive projects on your hands.
A dedicated place where communications are all gathered in the same place reduces searching, eliminates redundant messages, and lets everyone know when a team member is not available.
There are Better Ways to Collaborate Than Email
If you want a secure and effective way for your teams to collaborate, you need collaboration tools. As Inc contributor Bill Pfleging puts it “The trick is to find a vendor that offers a suite of tools that fits your business — and your employees’ — needs.”
Cadynce is designed with your team in mind. Put all your scattered emails, memos, and other scattered documents in one place. You can also easily share project files, secure your communications, and reduce distractions. Contact us today to see if Cadynce is the perfect replacement for your email collaborations.
Email: Why email is not good for communication (petersimoons.com)
5 Reasons To Ditch Email for Project Collaboration | Toolbox Collaboration
The Really Bad News About Using Email to Collaborate | Inc.com
