Email does not equal effective employee communication

Employment Today, August/September 2010 

We all look on disapprovingly if someone ends a relationship by email or text, so why do we put up with email for critical employee communication?

Email is simply too informal for some situations. You might think you’ve had a documented discussion following an email exchange with an employee, when all you have is avoid a real dialogue. For example, communicating a salary increase should actually occur as part of a wider conversation about their value to the organisation and what they want to get out of their employment.

Emails can often be misconstrued because they are written relatively casually. The rich and powerful non-verbal communication that happens with a face to face discussion is lost.

HR professionals need to realise that people like to, and need to, have physical contact with others to remain engaged. Large organisations run that risk even more, especially geographically diverse teams –managers need to consciously interact very regularly by phone as well as email. Feedback about how their job is going, where it fits into the organisation and so on needs to happen either face to face or over the phone.

If formal written communication is needed a letter is more appropriate than an email.

What are the risks of email?

• Too informal for discussing important HR processes like remuneration reviews and staff performance outcomes.

• Easy to send an email to the wrong person, or to a group of people, with potentially disastrous results.

• Important messages can get lost in the daily email avalanche. You can be unsure if people even read the email e.g. it could turn up two days later as a bounce.

• Typically there is no process linking an email from one step to another e.g. in a performance management situation.
How do you minimise email risks?

• Establish some policies around use of email, reducing reliance on it for key HR processes.

• Empower managers with other communication methods and skills.

• Use emails as a notification to direct the recipient to a software application for critical information rather than imbedding confidential information in emails.

• If you are using software tools to manage workflow processes, make sure you can configure to your needs rather than the system automatically sending e-mails without discretion so as to avoid “inbox overload”.