add efficiency to email Outlook 2002

[Pat S]

My question is about efficient use of email in a 20 person workgroup inside a
3000 person company.

One way to state my view of the problem is that my employer is using email
more than is efficient for the email format. I believe that we are working on
a method of distributing work that is more efficient and company-wide. But it
will be years before hourly workers see any effect. I need help in the
meantime.

Every month another department inside our company decides that it will send
a copy of their work to our department just in case we might need it. And
outside of our company we have 200 independent distributors & 20,000
independent sales individuals.

We use Outlook, & Exchange. In our dept we use email distribution lists &
private Inbox for email. We use a public folder for inbound fax. One of my
sub-questions is whether using a PUBLIC folder for EMAIL can add any
efficiency.

Each employee in our department is on all email distribution lists. So each
employee receives the same 200 new emails every day. For each one of us, 10
of these emails are ones that match up to our role in the department. We also
each receive a handfull of emails addressed to us individually.

When I question fellow employees, their usual answer is that I should use
better Outlook rules to delete unwanted email without touching it. I have
done my best and continue to feel that our system is inefficient. There are
too many variables to manage with rules. The list of senders is too big &
ever-changing.

Does anyone have any suggestions? If there is an article someplace, tell me
about it. If the answer is to use folder-type "x" with the _ _ _ _ and _ _ _
functions, tell me where I can learn about these. If the answer is that there
is very little room for improvement, tell me.
....Pat S

 

[Roady [MVP]]

You are not saying anything about the type of work that you are doing so
without a working scenario it is hard to make specific recommendations.

From the information provided your main issue doesn't require a technical
solution; it's caused by people not knowing how to use email and nobody
taking responsibility and thinking that they can rid of it by sending it to
anyone (and in your case even EVERYone else). Clearly define everybody's
responsibility in a certain process and instruct them how to use mail and
make a proper assessment on who to include in the mail discussion. A
technical solution that can help with that is implementing workflows. Note
that before you implement this you first need to re-evaluate your current
process and determine the responsibilities of the persons within that
process.

If mail needs to be archived you can use (Exchange based) archiving
software. If it still needs to be actively accessible for a while it can be
placed in a Public folder. You can set appropriate permissions if it needs
to be available for multiple departments. People just randomly sending you
emails and telling that you should deal with their spam (because basically
that is what it is) also gets back to the issue that they don't know how to
use email and/or don't know the(ir) responsibilities within the process.

Each employee in our department is on all email distribution lists.

Why is that?

 

[Judy Gleeson \(MVP Outlook\)]

I think you need to ask the manager of your group of 20 to request some
changed behaviours from the senders. Be explicit about what they should
send your team and to whom - not to all of you. Maybe you could have a
Shared Mailbox called "name of your team" and it gets all the internal
FYI/Spam and then people in your team choose to read it, respond etc. More
of a pull system than pushing stuff at you.

But as Roady said - you really haven't explained what your scenario is so
it' very hard to specifiy any solutions. I think that email étiquette
training may help a lot.

Regards

Judy Gleeson
MVP Outlook
Trainer and Consultant

There are various articles about using Outlook here: www.judygleeson.com
Canberra, Australia

 

[Pat S]

My employer is an insurance company. The insurance company offers a few
different types of products. These products are distributed through 3
different channels, all 3 composed of independent operators. My department
pays commission to the independent operators who sell our products. About 1/3
of our inbound email is from this group of independent operators (why have I
not been paid; you paid me incorrectly; change my email address). The other
2/3 of inbound email is from other employee workgroups within the company;
our processes are designed so that the work of several other job functions is
dependent on the status of the salespeople in the system. If the system shows
that that a sales agent's license is expired, the system will stop the work
of new policy setup, for example; they will send a message asking to update
the license so they can proceed; usually this means verifying that the sales
agent has renewed the license, and then us writng the new date to the system.
So In all cases, there is an inbound request for service, & an outbound reply
that the service has been completed.

Within our department, we have 2 official divisions of labor. This division
is intended to prevent us from stealing. This division would be one possible
way to use distribution lists & reduce the duplication of messages. But the
problem is that these work divisions do not make a lot of sense to common
people. Even to people in the business, these divisions are hard to remember.
It would be difficult to require anyone to remember what name we have
assigned to the sub-process where they must start their request for service.

I see some references to written material. I will read them.

And thank you for your replies.
Pat S