By Mark Gibbs
[Originally appeared in NETWORK WORLD, September 14, 1998.
Copyright (c) Network World, 1998; article reproduced here with
permission.]
If your favorite way to communicate with employees is via e-mail, think about the effectiveness of your message.
Winn Schwartau runs two security firms, yet he wouldn't recognize most of his employees if he ran into them on the street. That's because practically all of his business activity is managed by e-mail.
"We have a couple of employees I have never met or spoken to. I don't know their age, color, religion or anything," says Schwartau, the CEO of Interpact and The Security Experts. "They work out great."
He only meets with his assistant about once per week and says they can go for days without speaking to each other. And Schwartau can count on one hand the number of times he's seen his Webmaster in person or spoken to him on the phone.
The way he sees it, face-to-face or telephone communication isn't always necessary to get the job done. "It's all about professionalism, the right people and a good healthy dose of techno-independence," says Schwartau, who is also a Network World columnist.
Schwartau is riding the leading edge of management practice. He's successfully running a virtual corporation driven by information technology and electronic communications. And he's relying on one of the most powerful management tools of the computer age: e-mail.
However, the idea of management by e-mail often has negative connotations. Some managers who communicate solely via e-mail may inadvertently be sending the message that they don't care if the message gets through to the recipient.
Overreliance on e-mail as a communications channel is increasingly common. Managers often feel they're in the middle of an organization, pressured by senior executives to produce and overwhelmed by the job of dealing with staff.
Under these circumstances, it's not surprising that many managers dive behind their computers and issue edicts that manage the process rather than people.
Of course, it's not only managers who manage by e-mail. Staff, in turn, find they can manage their managers by confining their interaction to e-mail as much as possible. For both groups, e-mail can represent a means of escape from face-to-face communication.
While e-mail may indeed smooth the load to some degree, it also carries a big potential for misunderstanding. The problem, however, is not e-mail but communication skills.
"Employees who cannot communicate, whether orally or in writing, are less effective. This has little to do with e-mail," says John Gennaro, director of managed data services at Global One in Reston, Va.
In general, managers do little to improve the communication skills of their staffers, says Gennaro. The more proactive organizations teach their employees how to answer the telephone to convey a polished corporate image. But few companies train workers to improve their business writing or suggest guidelines for e-mail correspondence.
Even so, there are certain situations where bad e-mail may be more effective than the best face-to-face or telephone contact. For example, when you're communicating with native speakers of another language, "it's sometimes easier to understand a grammatically incorrect e-mail than it is to work through an accent over the phone," says Gennaro.
Thanks to increased telecommuting, virtual organizations and the need for greater mobility in business, managing by e-mail is here to stay. The key to making it work is knowing who you're communicating with and messaging about the right things.
Management Strategies
Establishing goals and providing feedback is even more critical when you don't talk to employees on a regular basis.
Mark Gibbs is a writer, contributing editor and columnist at NETWORK WORLD, and a consultant who spends far too much time reading e-mail. Send him some more and visit his site .
[Originally appeared in NETWORK WORLD, September 14, 1998.
Copyright (c) Network World, 1998; article reproduced here with
permission.]
If your favorite way to communicate with employees is via e-mail, think about the effectiveness of your message.
Winn Schwartau runs two security firms, yet he wouldn't recognize most of his employees if he ran into them on the street. That's because practically all of his business activity is managed by e-mail.
"We have a couple of employees I have never met or spoken to. I don't know their age, color, religion or anything," says Schwartau, the CEO of Interpact and The Security Experts. "They work out great."
He only meets with his assistant about once per week and says they can go for days without speaking to each other. And Schwartau can count on one hand the number of times he's seen his Webmaster in person or spoken to him on the phone.
The way he sees it, face-to-face or telephone communication isn't always necessary to get the job done. "It's all about professionalism, the right people and a good healthy dose of techno-independence," says Schwartau, who is also a Network World columnist.
Schwartau is riding the leading edge of management practice. He's successfully running a virtual corporation driven by information technology and electronic communications. And he's relying on one of the most powerful management tools of the computer age: e-mail.
However, the idea of management by e-mail often has negative connotations. Some managers who communicate solely via e-mail may inadvertently be sending the message that they don't care if the message gets through to the recipient.
Overreliance on e-mail as a communications channel is increasingly common. Managers often feel they're in the middle of an organization, pressured by senior executives to produce and overwhelmed by the job of dealing with staff.
Under these circumstances, it's not surprising that many managers dive behind their computers and issue edicts that manage the process rather than people.
Of course, it's not only managers who manage by e-mail. Staff, in turn, find they can manage their managers by confining their interaction to e-mail as much as possible. For both groups, e-mail can represent a means of escape from face-to-face communication.
While e-mail may indeed smooth the load to some degree, it also carries a big potential for misunderstanding. The problem, however, is not e-mail but communication skills.
"Employees who cannot communicate, whether orally or in writing, are less effective. This has little to do with e-mail," says John Gennaro, director of managed data services at Global One in Reston, Va.
In general, managers do little to improve the communication skills of their staffers, says Gennaro. The more proactive organizations teach their employees how to answer the telephone to convey a polished corporate image. But few companies train workers to improve their business writing or suggest guidelines for e-mail correspondence.
Even so, there are certain situations where bad e-mail may be more effective than the best face-to-face or telephone contact. For example, when you're communicating with native speakers of another language, "it's sometimes easier to understand a grammatically incorrect e-mail than it is to work through an accent over the phone," says Gennaro.
Thanks to increased telecommuting, virtual organizations and the need for greater mobility in business, managing by e-mail is here to stay. The key to making it work is knowing who you're communicating with and messaging about the right things.
Management Strategies
Establishing goals and providing feedback is even more critical when you don't talk to employees on a regular basis.
- Avoid ambiguity. The lack of personal contact in e-mail amplifies ambiguity. Read your e-mail before sending it. Is there anything that can possibly be misconstrued? If so, reword it.
- Ensure that everyone knows what matters. Assemble and summarize message threads, and flag the top priorities for your team.
- Keep your eye on the ball. Status reports sent via e-mail are no substitute for checking things out for yourself.
- Know your employees. Spend time working closely with staff before relying on management by e-mail.
- Establish a hierarchy of communication tools depending on urgency, such as regular mail to fax to e-mail to voice mail to real-time voice.
- Agree on routine. Set expectations for how often workers should check their e-mail and voice mail so everyone is on the same page.
- Know your lowest common denominator. File transfers with attached video clips, multimedia files, and other bells and whistles can create far more aggravation than they are worth, particularly to dial-up users. Drop back to the "stone age" of pure text messages whenever possible.
- Publicly recognize employees for a job well done by sending a message to the whole team.
- Don't discipline by e-mail. The medium is too impersonal and too easily misinterpreted to carry a rebuke or criticism.
Mark Gibbs is a writer, contributing editor and columnist at NETWORK WORLD, and a consultant who spends far too much time reading e-mail. Send him some more
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