I Don’t Read My Emails
I don’t even read the emails I send myself
As I sit here at my desk in our open-plan workspace, I look at my unread email count. Today it’s up to 470. Some of these are emails I actually haven’t read. Many are ones that I scanned and decided I needed to do something about later—marking them unread, but never actually getting back to them. Perhaps the most telling thing is that I was searching for a particular business meme I had emailed myself from Twitter earlier in the week.
That’s when I realized I had dozens of unread emails FROM MYSELF.
If I’m not even reading what I send to myself, what chance does anyone else have of cutting through the clutter? You almost need the same kind of email marketing ninja skills to get noticed in the inboxes of your coworkers as you do to reach customers as this point.
The average open rate for internal emails in companies is 66 percent, according to an infographic from Newsweaver.
Email’s big fail
It painted a pretty clear picture. Email simply isn’t cutting it most of the time to communicate and collaborate with my coworkers. It’s rarely immediate. You get no context, unless there’s an awful indented email string below that’s a bajillion pixels long because of everyone’s signatures. Attachments don’t get pulled forward. I’m sure there’s more, but I’m getting exhausted just thinking about it. There’s something special (and not in a good way) about email when people’s biggest fear about returning from vacation is digging their way out of email mountain.
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Test driving something new
One of the perks of working for a business communications company is that sometimes you get to test drive the latest and greatest tools. So I was pretty excited to hear that I was going to get to try out our newest team collaboration tool, MiTeam, that’s available as part of MiCollab as well as with MiCloud Office. I was excited because it’s a work stream-style collaboration tool—the kind where you can have different conversation streams with different defined groups.
Discussions all happen in real-time and it pulls all of the context, like file sharing and to-do lists, right into a single interface. You don’t have to be an inbox search guru to find what you need. And perhaps best of all, it works pretty much the same across all of my devices, so it’s easy to keep up with conversations if I’m out to lunch or sitting in a meeting with a dead laptop battery, but a well-charged iPhone.
And something that’s especially good for all you midsize to enterprise businesses out there (and I suspect some of you tech-savvy smaller businesses, too), is that Towner Communications and Mitel’s MiTeam, unlike many of the other work stream-style team collaboration tools out there, can fully integrate with your business phone system and user management (like Active Directory), so you can do things like make one-click calls and start video conferences right from the app.
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The final verdict
Will it cure world hunger? Probably not (though the team that does might use it). But for my part, during our trial, I found myself getting a lot more done when I got real-time answers and didn’t have to go searching for what I needed in a dozen different tools.
If email isn’t quite hacking it for you, it might be worth contacting us to see if there’s a version of MiTeam that’s right for you. It was certainly right for me.
