Many managers are looking for ways to improve their business communications and reduce wasted time inside and outside their companies. Are the more common business communication tools of meetings and emails the real problem? According to recent studies, the number of meetings and their duration has increased, but meetings are often less than 50% productive. Are we using meetings when another communication tool like email could be more effective? Email usage is on the rise and this too is getting a bad reputation as being overused or poorly built. Emails are used for internal communications and external marketing, so they need to be effective. Many managers are looking for ways to reduce both meetings and emails in their companies. Is reduction the answer or is the answer to use the tools correctly and more effectively?
I’ve written a book on meeting management and articles on what goes wrong in meetings, so I know where most people need help. I wanted to confirm that others may be concerned about what can go wrong in meetings and that meetings need to improve. Since I recently wrote an article online titled Taking care of manners in meetings, so I thought it might be helpful to use a popular Internet search engine to gauge the importance of the topic of “meeting etiquette” or “meeting manners.” Using these as keywords in my search, the combined total was over 41,900 results. Just to see if there was agreement with some of my meeting improvement ideas in my articles and books, I read some of the results that had descriptions indicating that they would provide solutions. Much of the text I read included some of the thirteen elements from my article or some of the suggestions from my book. However, they often listed other problem areas that were specific to the job. While the article I reviewed didn’t deliver all of the same things that I felt were essential, they did reinforce my belief that meetings are important and that everyone should know how to leverage this method of group communication for business purposes.
After searching for meetings, I decided to check out “email etiquette” and got over 348,000 results. I scanned the list of options on the first few pages and checked the ones that said to include tips in their descriptions. Some that I read I agreed with as being relevant to professional emails and others I disagreed with because they might work for personal email but were not the correct use for business communications. However, I found that much of the text matched many of the thirteen I listed in the online article I wrote last month titled “Encouraging Email Etiquette”. Some justified their belief in what they claimed with an explanation, but most did not. In order for people to display proper email etiquette, they not only need to know what is acceptable, but also why it should be the norm. Email is a great communication tool, but only if the receiver understands what the sender is trying to say. While you may not agree with all of the email etiquette items I reviewed, the number of results clearly indicates that this is a valid communication concern for business professionals.
He wanted to know if the two most popular business communication tools needed to be scaled down or if they should be used effectively. Turning to the Internet as a research tool, I’m not sure if the resulting numbers can indicate which tool people really need help with the most or which one is being used the most. Either way, I’m sure the results indicate that all professionals need to improve their communication skills for both meetings and email for business purposes. Improvement and proper utilization is more realistically the answer to business communication problems than trying to reduce the necessary use of meetings or email.