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E-mail is a tool of our digital age promising greater productivity. Management uses it to send important information to staff, who in turn use it to communicate with each other-all with paperless, instantaneous efficiency. Understanding its strengths can help you use e-mail to your advantage.
E-Mail in Healthcare
The electronic medical record is changing healthcare. Surprisingly, e-mail is also having an impact. A hospital in Scotland e-mails referrals to eye specialists, a practice projected to save millions of pounds each year.1 A "smart pillbox" device sends an e-mail alert if the patient misses a dose or takes the wrong medication.2 And a Brooklyn physician encourages patients to e-mail him signs and symptoms-even digital photographs of injuries-for evaluation.3 That's good news for patients.
But e-mail can be time consuming-as much as an hour and a half of payroll time per employee in the course of a week. Answering an e-mail may only take 30 or 40 seconds, but the interruption takes almost that long to recover from, according to Peter Riley, IT consultant.4 And hundreds of e-mails add up.
E-mail affects morale, too. A recent survey marks misuse of e-mail as one of the top pet peeves in the workplace, including e-mailing too often and using the blind carbon copy (BCC) feature. Yet nearly half say nothing about it.5
For management, the problem is endemic. Executives spend 2-3 hours each day reading and responding to e-mails, a trend creeping into the lives of employees.
"E-mail has become the 21st century's 'cover your butt' technique of choice," said Dr. Ken Siegel, a Los Angeles psychologist and management consultant.6
To avoid wasting time on e-mail, you first need to know what it's really good for.
E-Mail is Broadcasting
Your hospital leadership may use e-mail to communicate, a process intended to exchange information between groups or individuals. But to make sure a message is understood, feedback is needed. Unless the elicited response is very specific ("Are you attending the 10 a.m. meeting this Friday?"), e-mail only goes one way.
"E-mail is not a communications device. It's a broadcast device," Siegel said. "E-mail is a tool with clear and viable uses and benefits. Communication isn't one of them."6 What is needed, then, are clear expectations.
A good start is a communications policy specifying how and when e-mail is used, emphasizing its strengths in sending information to multiple users. Insisting e-mail be a broadcast medium and not a substitute for human interaction will encourage teamwork.
Rules of Etiquette
If you must communicate using e-mail, here are a few rules of etiquette offered by Microsoft:7
- Be informal, not sloppy-follow your company's protocol for communications, including abbreviations.
- Keep messages brief-one subject per email.
- Use sentence case -USING UPPERCASE IS LIKE SHOUTING.
- Use carbon copy (CC) and BCC with caution-sending too many copies will clutter inboxes-and waste time-of other users.
- Don't use e-mail as an excuse to avoid dealing with a person directly.
- Use professional language. Your tone-sarcasm, light-heartedness and other verbal nuances-is lost in e-mail messages.
- Remember, your e-mail isn't private-don't put anything in an e-mail you wouldn't write on a postcard.
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