What do you do when an email has been accidentally sent to the wrong person? Immediately panic followed by "recalling" the message which only highlights your mistake? We may not even notice we've sent it to the wrong person, and the information transmitted can have huge implications on your business.
While this is something we might just laugh off as a silly mistake or a minor lapse of concentration, the consequences could be worse.
Eg - two of your staff liaising via email regarding a client. One person assumes these discussions will remain "internal" within your organisation. After much to-ing and fro-ing the other person decides to forward the email to an external party to seek their contribution - forgetting that the entire content of the email - including sensitive or inappropriate information which has been passed on.
It might have only been a brief "We should meet to discuss..." message but by now your blood pressure will be rising, and the impact on your business could be disastrous.
Email has now become an essential tool for modern communication but its use has snowballed in recent times. Everyday we send internal and external messages in the millions.
Unlike a wrong number on a telephone call where we hang up and try again, or letter which is returned to sender if wrongly addressed, once an email message is sent it is almost impossible to retrieve. With this in mind, organisations are now considering the impact of email use and productivity on the bottom line.
Whilst you may not be able to remove the problem completely (unless of course you ban email in your organisation!) you can minimise the chances of disasters happening.
One step organisations are taking to deal with such risks is to enhance existing IT policy and create procedures that provide clear guidelines on when and where to use email within the business.
It's easy to bury our head in the sand and say "it won't happen here" but just as computers crash and paperwork gets 'lost', it can happen and often does, always when you least expect it.
Although the solution itself seems quite simplistic and common sense it isn't always common practice.
Some questions to ask when putting together guidelines include:
Outside the procedural, other considerations should include:
- Are staff spending too much time dealing with email and not enough time generating sales/dealing with customer queries/collecting debts?
- Have staff been adequately trained to be effective with their email program?
- With the introduction of new procedures, does training need to be revisited?
A global company's executive team had been experiencing problems with email. They identified what the most frustrating thing about email was, what outcomes they would like to achieve with email, how much time they spend on dealing with it daily etc.
They went back to basics. Instead of using only email correspondence, they learned to draw on each others knowledge and to regularly share the internal expertise their colleagues had. They started to use different tools to liaise with each other and their clients (such as phone, mail and face to face visits). Better management of their email was assisted by tools that existed in their software and through allocation of specific time to work on emails.
From a quantative perspective, one employee went so far as to say he believed his time on email had reduced by a whopping 30%. All acknowledged they questioned the emails they sent and were more considerate of others when generating replies. The volume of cc'd messages was also significantly reduced.
The moral of the story
Risk is a part of life. Risk management is an important part of business. We insure our home, lives and businesses against loss. We can only hope to impart similar skills, knowledge and attitudes to our staff to ensure our business concepts and intellectual property remain protected.
Is your business safe?