Have you ever sent an e-mail to an employee after work hours with the expectation that they’ll check it? Of course, we’ve all done it. That’s the nature of today’s corporate environment; everybody’s plugged in 24×7. So we never think twice about sending those late night e-mails, but maybe we should.
I recently interviewed Tim Sanders, author of Saving the World at Work: What Companies and Individuals Can Do to Go Beyond Making a Profit to Making a Difference for an Executive Briefing e-newsletter, and he told me about a blog he developed called “Email A to Z”, which discusses the relationship between e-mail training and work-life balance.!@!
“We found that if you don’t train managers on the use of e-mail, there’s a variety of terrible things they do, but the worst thing is they steal personal time from employees with these 3 a.m. e-mails and 75 e-mails on weekends,” he said. “We’ve learned it has a direct relationship on turnover.”
Some of the tips on the “Email A to Z” blog include mastering your subject line, using e-mail for positive reinforcement and giving employees a break by not e-mailing them after hours. It seems like such an obvious thing to do, but how many of you are actually doing it? And if you are, what are you training your employees on? If you aren’t, how is that affecting your employees?
