One of the most common gripes business owners have is email management. Staying on top of emails can be a challenge when you’re short on time and up to your neck in running a business. But if you’re still up at midnight wading through emails or regularly forgetting to reply to emails, then missing appointments or even worse – losing business – then you’ve got a problem.
Newly included with Office 365 and Outlook 2016 is a feature called Groups. It can be a great way to collaborate within your business whilst providing the same familiarity of Outlook, combined with the powerful security and collaborative features of SharePoint.
One of the most common ways businesses collaborate is simply by sharing documents through email, but there are so many problems with this, as we often reiterate. When sharing documents in this way, you are really only sending a copy of the original file. Any changes made by another colleague on that file will have to then be manually transferred onto the original, and if you’re dealing with several colleagues and copies, it can be a nightmare trying to keep track of the most recent changes. On top of this, sharing copies can often result in chunks of text being accidentally omitted from the final document. Read more
It’s not uncommon for businesses to legally have to provide upon request years and years’ worth of emails, perhaps to prove or disprove fraud allegations, or in the case of your business being audited – yet searching through thousands of messages for relevant content can lead to complete chaos.
What then happens if a member of staff accidentally deletes a couple of messages? It’s so easily done, but a lapse in concentration or the mis-click of a button could result in future legal issues, or problems within your business if there is a severe loss of data. What happens when the deletion isn’t quite so accidental? Most business owners and managers will have let a member of staff go under bad terms. Before you have time to remove their authorisation, what’s to stop them from causing havoc in return, perhaps altering or deleting entire mailboxes? Read more
There’s no doubt about the fact that email is an effective method of communication for the workplace, and of course this is why it’s the primary tool used within businesses to correspond both internally and externally. However, this has meant email has become severely overused and our current comfort in using a very familiar method is keeping more convenient and efficient means kept in the shadows. One of the most common issues amongst businesses is the immense overload of email clutter received, which can take hours to sift through – valuable time that should be used on more important matters. Read more
If we were to stop for a moment and consider the ways we interact outside of work using smartphones and social media we would very quickly realise that our work communication methods are truly dated. In most small businesses I consult with, email is still the most heavily utilised and often the only method of digital communication. Contrast this to how we communicate in our personal lives and it’s a world apart. When was the last time you emailed a friend to ask a question? You probably sent them an instant message or left a message on their Facebook page. How about the last time you organised a group event? Chances are you used a Facebook group or event in favour of a group email. So why aren’t we doing this at work? Read more