Email overload is one of the top communications complaints we hear from focus groups with employees of large companies. But ironically, when asked about their preferred methods of receiving company communications, email is often at the top of the list.
Conversely, our clients often tell us that employees don’t read emails. We believe there are two factors at work here. One is that employees receive too many all-company emails, so they begin to ignore them. The second is that those all-company emails tend to be poorly constructed, with a dense wall of text and the call to action hidden in there somewhere.
One solution to email overload that we’ve developed for our clients is a weekly or bi-weekly email digest. It summarizes all the company-wide emails in a way that’s easier for employees to digest. Here are five ways these email digests are an improvement on the typical storm of intermittent emails to employees:
Our agency designs branded templates for the email digest that are more colorful and visual than the standard all-text email. This makes the digest more engaging for employees and helps it stand out in an inbox suffering from email overload. Employees instantly recognize it, and knowing that it only comes every week, or every other week, are more likely to stop and open it.
The email digest includes a headline and one short blurb for each company-wide email, summarizing the news or highlighting the call to action. This means employees can quickly scan one email and get the gist of many emails. If they don’t click on any of the topics, they’ll still be aware of and have some understanding of everything that’s being communicated.
When an employee is scanning the email digest and sees a topic that’s relevant to them, they simply click on the link that takes them to the full email/article on the intranet. From there, it’s also easy for them to follow links to related information, forms or other online resources. This helps build follow-through for action items that might otherwise be lost in email overload.
Another added benefit of these email digests is that when employees click to read past the blurb of any topic, they go to the longer version of that communication on the intranet. And the more you can get employees to the intranet, the better. Especially in companies where a great deal of the culture happens online instead of in the office, building traffic to the intranet is helpful.
Finally, one of the benefits of using an email digest to reduce email overload is that the communications department drives the project. Other departments and business functions become more accustomed to looping in the communications folks when something’s going on. And, to some extent, the communications team can control the traffic flow of what’s going out to employees.
