How E-mail enhances efficiency?

It’s important to continually keep up with technology that makes it easier to stay in touch with customers and colleagues. But e-mail should not be taken for granted. This fabulous technology should be looked upon as a tool to enhance communication rather than a replacement for communication.

E-mail is a wonderful tool that makes it possible for us to achieve more, with greater efficiency and professionalism. Remember though, that e-mail is only a supplement and should never replace human interaction.

Let’s look at just a few other ways in which e-mail is helping us to increase our efficiency:

• Connection to people and information. E-mail helps you to stay informed and keeps other people informed more effectively than would be possible if we didn’t have it.
• Improved project management. With such a global community these days, working together on a project can prove to be quite difficult when people are in different companies, places, and time zones. E-mail makes this process so much easier.
• Team building. E-mail is helping to make group work more effective. All team members must be briefed with a common set of objectives so that they realize the importance of replying promptly to all team mail. They also need compatible software so that they can attach and read all the documents that will be sent among members.
• Global communication. With Internet connections, it’s possible to reach out way beyond the boundaries of your organization. You can join discussion groups and mailing lists relating to your specific interests and subsequently engage in discussions with thousands of people around the world.
• Better record management. With e-mail now often replacing telephone conversations, letters, and memos, much of the information is in one place, so it becomes easier to manage. All messages regarding a specific topic can be kept in a special folder. Alternatively, a search will quickly call up all the messages that meet certain criteria.
• Virtual meetings. Before e-mail came about, many more meetings took place. It is sometimes quite difficult to get lots of people together at the same venue and time, and with the pressures of work, it could be a week or more before everyone involved could get together. E-mail solves this problem. A message can be sent to everyone involved, the issue or problem can be discussed with everyone being copied, and a lot of time can be saved.
• Collaborative work. E-mail makes it easy and cheap to share photographs, graphics, files, and even videos. Whether your colleague is in the next office or on the other side of the world, distance is no longer an issue. As long as everyone has compatible versions of the necessary software, it’s easy to attach anything to an e-mail message.