But here's a story you may not have heard. One of our clients described an email message he recently received from upper management at his biotech company.

The message began with some information about how to request annual leave. The middle described plans to landscape the south side of the building. And the message ended with these words. "By the way, you have a new boss. The Product Development Team's new Director will be James Yang. Margie Esposito, the former Director, left the building at close of business last Friday."

Obviously, the cardinal rule of using email as a management tool is "Know when to use email." Some messages, like a sudden change in upper management, should be delivered in person. Email should never be used as a substitute for personal interaction.

But email's immediacy and informality are well suited to some common management tasks. Read on to learn how you can make the most of email as a management tool:

Use email as a quick technique for handing out praise
(It's one way to get your employees to read your email!) Whenever you see an opportunity to congratulate an employee for a job well done, dash off a 5 - 7 sentence email praise message. Instead of waiting until annual review time, praise your people at the time of their accomplishment, then save the email message to incorporate into the review.

Use email to solicit your employees' input on best practices
Collect input for a particular task or project. Review the information they send you and summarise it. Then, submit the summary of best practices to everyone who contributed. You may even be able to incorporate the best practices summary into an operations manual, a procedure, or a policy.

Use email to create community when workers are at different sites or on different shifts
You might write a weekly message to everyone (or an informal email newsletter) to keep people up-to-date on projects or initiatives. Use your weekly message to request input or announce accomplishments or deadlines. Email can facilitate collaboration between remote workers so be a matchmaker; suggest employees begin an email dialogue when you believe they have important information to share.

Use email as a brainstorming tool
Email's a great help when you're in the planning or conceptual phase of a project. Send out an email request for quick open-ended input. Make it clear that you welcome your employees' random, short-burst thinking. Be sure they know this is one time when they definitely don't have to send a well-crafted reply.

Develop small email distribution lists
People hate "All Staff" messages. They hate sifting through an inbox full of messages that barely apply to the work they do. So don't send a message to the list unless everyone on the list really needs to know. And don't reply to the list when only the writer needs to read your reply. As manager, you should discuss these fine points of list etiquette with the email writers in your department and help everyone send only "need to know" messages.

Communicate standards for good email writing, and model good writing yourself
When email is well-written, it is a real time-saver. But when it's poorly written it is a dreadful time-waster. Protect your employees from this time-waster by developing standards for writing email. Tell people that you expect email to be organised so the main point of the message appears on the first screen, to be spell-checked, and not to be written in ALL CAPS.

Think of it this way - your organisation probably has an email use policy that covers who owns the system and whether email messages are private. Accompany the use policy with writing guidance and you'll get the most out of the email system and the employees who use it.

© E-WRITE, 1999, www.ewriteonline.com

Reproduced by kind permission from E-WRITE. E-WRITE teaches writing courses, writes the contents for websites, email marketing letters and newsletters.

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