Email Guidelines: Do You Have Them?

signRecently the old debate popped up again: what to do and not to do with email? A colleague started a rant about colleagues who continuously CC lots of people. Another chipped in about colleagues using 'reply all' too much.

Ah, the beauty of collaboration! ;-) Doesn't it all come down to agreeing how we work together? For this reason many companies set up a 'code of conduct' (or something like this). We have one too. Strangely enough these 'code of conducts' doesn't say much about using email for instance - as far as I know.

Some time ago we did an internal workshop with Novay about email productivity. One of the assignments was to come up with 'email guidelines'. The great thing is consensus about the 10 email guidelines we all would adhere to was easily found. (By the way, these guidelines were only approved by the workshop members, not by the whole organization. We still have a way to go...)

So, does your company have email guidelines? If so, how did you define them? And if not, what are your ideas why your company doesn't have them?

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