Does your team need an email charter?

Many of my leadership coaching clients cite email overwhelm as a key source of their stress. Not only that, but in an organisational culture which equates being on top of your emails with effectiveness, it can impair their ability to focus on what really matters.

Here is a list of the kind of agreements you might want to have in place in your team. Use this as a starting point for your own charter of how and when you communicate electronically as a team. You may wish to do the same for other channels you use, e.g. social media platforms or team meetings, and consider how and what you use each channel for. 

Our email charter: 

1. We’ll check our email at least every (X) hours/days

2. We don’t check emails when we are in meetings.

3. We’ll use the phone and leave a message if something is truly time critical.

4. We’ll write email subject lines that immediately explain what the email is about.

5. When we need input to make a decision, we’ll preface email subjects with ‘for comment’ or ‘action required’ with a clear and realistic timeframe for responding e.g. ‘action required by 31 Sept midday BST’ 

6. If input is not required we’ll use ‘for info/FYI’ 

7. We assume that if somebody is copied (cc) into an email they don’t need to respond.

8. We will avoid using the “reply to all” unless everyone absolutely needs the information

9. We’ll pick up the phone or call a meeting after 3 emails on one topic

10. We accept that emails sent from phones occasionally have typos.

11. We use bold to help people scan key information

12. We use headings to help readers understand which area of our business or which project, the email is about. 

13. We consider our organisation’s values when we are drafting emails (you may wish to flag specific values here and an example of how this translates into email behaviour) 

14. We always give people the benefit of the doubt if something can be understood in two ways.

15. When we write an email and are feeling emotional, we agree to save the email and come back to it when we are feeling calmer e.g. the next day.

16. If we’re having interpersonal problems, we don’t use email – we’ll pick up the phone or arrange to meet face to face. 

17. We understand that complex issues are best explained in person, whereas email is useful for short, factual dissemination of information. We do our best to choose the most appropriate means of communication every time. 

18. We use our team calendar to keep informed about when our colleagues are out of the office and seek alternative input or plan our communications, as necessary. 1

9. If we use other communications channels/social media e.g. whatsapp, salesforce chatter, Slack, we are clear about what kind of communication each channel is for, and how it is going to be used.

These are just examples of agreements you might make. What are your biggest communications challenges as a team? How do you want to be describing how you work together as a team? What one change could help improve your communication? Does your team need an email charter?