How to effectively manage email for remote work

Remote work has grown massively in popularity over the past few years as companies increasingly rely on online collaboration tools to get work done. With more people than ever working remotely at least some of the time, new challenges are emerging.

One of the most pressing challenges for remote workers is effective email management. Since remote workers are mostly cut off from in-person interactions, the bulk of their communication and collaboration with colleagues takes place online, with collaboration tools and email becoming the main channels for business communication.

In this blog, we’ll try to understand some of the common challenges of remote email management, provide tips and tricks for better email productivity and efficiency, and highlight some ways you can manage your email – and your time – effectively. Let’s dive in!

1 Understanding the challenges of remote email management

Remote workers are exposed to a range of challenges that can add pressure to their workdays and complicate their efforts at effectively managing their emails.

The lack of face-to-face interactions means most communication takes place over email. This can lead to email overload as well as potential misunderstandings.

The blending of personal and professional lives also put pressure on remote workers who may struggle to separate work from life. Too often, remote workers will check emails outside of work hours, leading to burnout and affecting their overall productivity.

Security is also a main concern. Email is still the main channel for cyberattacks. Without adequate security measures and high levels of awareness of security risks, remote workers may put themselves – and their organizations – at risk of cyber threats.

Poor email management can also lead to emails getting lost, which may result in missed deadlines and tasks being overlooked. In fact, poor email management is a main cause of productivity decreases, increased stress, breakdowns in communication, delayed project timelines, and overall lower employee morale.

Addressing common issues and their impacts is essential to creating a positive and productive remote work environment for employees.

2 Setting up an efficient email system

Remote workers looking to improve their email productivity should firstly focus on setting up an efficient system for dealing with emails. A well-organized inbox is far easier to deal with and can encourage greater productivity and efficiency.

Start by categorizing emails by using folders, labels, rules and filters. This ensures that important emails are visible and can receive the quickest attention.

Prioritize effectively by adopting the 4 Ds of email management, namely

1. Do: if an email requires action that can be done within 2 minutes, do it immediately.
2. Delegate: if the task can be handled by someone in a more appropriate role, delegate. 
3. Defer: if the email requires more attention or time, schedule it for later and move it to a designated ‘Follow-up’ folder.
4. Delete: immediately remove unnecessary emails (and remember to unsubscribe from newsletters and promotional emails that can quickly clog up your inbox)

Third-party email performance optimization tools such as timetoreply can also help remote workers by tracking incoming emails and providing alerts to any emails that have gone unanswered for too long.

This is particularly important in customer-facing roles where there’s a direct correlation between speedy responses to emails and customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.

3 Best practices for effective communication

There’s no substitute for effective, well-written communication in business. By communicating clearly, remote workers can significantly improve their effectiveness and achieve greater email productivity.

Best practices for more effective email communication include:
 Be clear and upfront about the purpose of your email and keep the text as brief as possible while still conveying all the important information.

• Make use of bullet points and numbered lists to organize information and highlight key points.
• Use simple language by avoiding jargon and always maintain professionalism in your email copy.
• Be descriptive in the subject line to ensure the recipient understands the reason and context for the email.
• Use a professional greeting and closing. Don’t fall into the trap of being overly familiar – it can all to easily be misinterpreted as unprofessional.
• Take care to only include the most relevant people in your emails. Resist the urge to cc too many people who may not be directly relevant to the contents of the email.
• Reply promptly and set reminders for follow-ups to important information. All too often colleagues are waiting on feedback or information to complete tasks. Make sure you are not the bottleneck!

4 Utilizing Productivity Tools

Managing email is not all about user behavior. We are fortunate to live in a time when there is a treasure trove of smart tools and apps available to help improve our email management and productivity efforts.

By making use of email productivity tools, remote workers can reduce stress while ensuring all the most important email-based tasks and assignments are completed speedily.

Remote workers using Gmail as their email platform have access to several productivity-boosting tools, including:

• Filters and labels that automatically sort and categorize emails based on different criteria.
• Smart Compose and Smart Reply which draw on AI-powered suggestions to speed up email writing and even offer one-click replies.
• A priority inbox for the most important emails, reducing clutter.

Those of us who work on Outlook can make use of:

• Rules and alerts that automatically manage incoming emails by categorizing, flagging or moving emails.
• Quick steps, which are one-click actions for performing several tasks, for example setting up meetings in your calendar.
• A focused inbox for all the most important work-related emails (and an ‘Other’ inbox for the rest).

Tools such as Slack and Trello also offer a productivity boost by reducing reliance on email in favor of quicker messaging-based communication. Slack for example organizes conversations into channels and threads to keep things focused and integrates with email to allow for collaboration with colleagues without having to switch apps. Project management tool Trello uses boards, lists and cards to help teams organize their tasks and projects, with positive impacts on productivity.

Dedicated email performance optimization tools such as timetoreply add productivity-boosting capabilities beyond that offered by email platforms such as Gmail and Outlook. These include email response time tracking, deep analytics and reporting capabilities, the ability to set and track custom SLAs, and insight into team and individual email performance.

5 Managing rime efficiently

It’s important to note that no amount of technology can compensate for poor time management. Remote workers must take care to manage their time efficiently by cutting out wasteful activities and prioritizing high-value actions.

As a first step, consider establishing ‘no email’ times. These are designated email-free periods in the day where remote workers do not check on or respond to emails, but rather focus on deep work. This may require you to customize email notifications to reduce interruptions, with only the highest-priority emails prompting a notification.

Remote workers must also take care to avoid burnout. The average office worker receives 121 emails every single day. Add growing expectations for speedy responses, and most office workers are under constant pressure to track and respond to a dizzying number of emails.

Email performance optimization tools can help by automating some of the tasks associated with email productivity and alerting remote workers to any pressing priorities that have not received adequate attention.

Since there is a direct correlation between speedy response times and customer experience, loyalty and revenue growth, remote workers that are part of customer-facing teams can benefit greatly from the use of tools such as timetoreply.

6 Enhancing virtual team collaboration

Effective collaboration is vital for high-performance teams. But with colleagues spread out across various locations, collaboration can be tricky. Maintaining effective communication within remote teams depends on adherence to a few golden rules, including:

Establishing deadlines and clarifying expectations by clearly communicating goals, deadlines, and expectations using various communication channels, including virtual meetings and emails.

Predefining communication guidelines by creating structured communication guidelines and specifying the channels for different types of communication.

Leveraging technological innovations such as collaboration software and email performance optimization tools to enhance team efficiency.
Using diagrams and visuals to simplify communication and ensure clarity and engagement within teams.

Many remote workers also use shared or team mailboxes, especially in customer-facing roles. Shared mailboxes offer several benefits, including increased visibility and transparency, a unified view of team priorities and challenges, and improved knowledge sharing.

Managing shared mailboxes can be made easier by:

• Standardizing processes with email templates, standard operating procedures, and extensive use of FAQs and other knowledge resources.
• Using labels to organize emails by topic, importance, or sender.
• Striving to achieve Inbox Zero, a rigorous email management strategy aimed at keeping the inbox empty, or nearly empty, with little to no unread emails.