The Importance Of Email Communication

Email communication is important type of written communication. Today, communications are conducted among business firms, organizations and companies mostly via emails. This is not only the cheapest but also the most reliable means of communications. The companies and organizations communicate with other companies and organizations for business purposes through emails. The orders are placed through emails; the enquiries are placed through emails; the picture samples of being imported/exported things are sent via emails as attachments. Moreover email provides most authentic and secure means of communication. The records of past emails can be retrieved very easily in moments.

Nowadays, email communications has extended to more than business among employees, which opens doors to many ethical and technological complications. In some cases employees tend to spread rumors about other staff or organizations, disclose information or data to unwanted parties, use offensive language in their communication which conflict the ethical practices of an individual in organizations.

Furthermore, employees tend to send large amount of attachments, movies and sound clips to one another or to large group of people. Thus, unwanted network traffic, increase of unrequired email storage

Some of the employees behaviors are as follows are as follows

Employees use there office emails to receive newsletters from their favorite e-magazine, or use their office emails in website such as Facebook or LinkedIn or etc. which opens many doors of junk and spam attacks!

Employees use their office emails to stay in touch with their families and friends

Employees receive personal mails i.e. their credit card details, bank statements or sometimes medicals histories… etc.

Instead of using company’s intranet to for announcements and memos, People send heavy attachments to huge number of people from their emails

The aim of this research is to understand how emails are being used in organizations, what is the outcome of in-proper usage and then conclusion of what needs to be done to properly use emails and other communications channels such as intranet (MS SharePoint) telephones. also, what policies and procedures the organization should put in practice to increase users’ awareness on email usage and provide control over the information within it

Part Two: Literature Review

Emails in general, what the importance of it (2 paragraphs)

Effective communication plays vital role in the success of an organization. Every organization, great or small, uses different forms of communication to make its links stronger with other both inland and overseas organizations. The purpose of all types of business communications is to impart and convey information and messages through different communication media. Jennifer M. George and Gareth R. Jones in their book ‘Contemporary Management, comment about richness of information: “The amount of information that a communication medium can carry and the extent to which the medium enables the sender and receiver to reach a common understanding.” There are many types of communication that exists in business entity, yet there are four major types of Business communication, which are common and extensively used. They are Face-To-Face Communication, Telephone or Voicemail, Personal Written Messages and Impersonal Written Messages.

Of all the forms of communication, email is the most significant. The small organizations communicate with other organizations on small scale depending upon its business needs. Larger organizations deploy its specific departments to deal with huge number of emails and online communications. These greater organizations’ business depends to a great extent upon emails. To cope with this challenge, they employ special IT staff to manage and maintain the availability of this communication media.

Other means of communications (2 Paragraphs)

Apart from emails, organisations also have other means of communication medias available such as telephones. Telephone is the most important form of communication for exchange of ideas, information and solving various issues promptly and urgently. This mode of communication is effective when parties are exchanging their ideas with same language and they can understand. So telephone is the best form of communication, but it is convenient for short and important discussions. When both the parties belong to different countries and they speak different languages, it is feared they may misunderstand each other.

Sometimes, when the organisation conveys a message or announce new product or service to selected or multiple group of staff, they use the following channels

Business Letters

Annual and Monthly Meetings

Publications

Notices and Manuals

Advertisements

Declarations

Publications

Memos

Frequent Meetings

Campaigns

Declarations

Press Releases

Journal Articles

Facsimile

Of all the modes of communication that has been mentioned so far, email is has attained the most important place in the world of business. Without email, the promotion and development of the business is almost impossible. This is why business communications and correspondence are carried out mostly through email. Every flourishing business organization receives hundreds, even thousands of emails daily from all over the world.

In 2003, the Radicati Group conducted a digital research after studying fifty companies worldwide; typical corporate user receives an average of 81 e-mail messages per day and sends 29 e-mails per day. That daily total of 110 messages represents growth of about 80 percent compared with last year. Most of the increase is not spam-related, according to the study. The average size of e-mails with attachments is also rising, another research by the same group indicates, “Daily global e-mail volume of 210 billion messages will double by 2012”.

Radicati Group research indicated a remarkable growth of emails received by corporate user in 2006, 55% increase of email volume received since 2003. If users spend an average of one minute to read and respond to each message, this flood of e-mail traffic will consume more than a quarter of the typical eight hours workday – with no guarantee that users actually read the messages that are most important. Additionally, if e-mail traffic continues to increase at this rate, the average corporate e-mail user will spend 64% of the workday managing e-mail messages in 2010. As shown in figure 1

Figure 1: Percent of work day spent in managing emails

While, number of emails inclines throughout the day, using emails adequately can increase the staff productivity or it may be a time wasting source of communication media if not managed properly. Higher the volume of unread emails get the more chances of delay in email response, decision making and sometimes creating misunderstandings between co‐workers, vendors or customers and may cause financial or reputational impact. Such incidents are result of 3 main issues.

The top 3 problems of emails (3 paragraphs)

Research methodologies (2 Paragraphs)

The ten commandments of emails (3 Paragraphs)