Share email with a team member

- Most of the time, most of us are the only ones using our email inbox. However, there are times when it's a wise strategy to share your email inbox with someone else to distribute the load and be more productive. Some examples include if a team member goes on medical leave and someone else needs to help them with their email while they're gone, or where someone has an assistant, virtual or otherwise, who is trying to lighten the load.

First, you'll want to establish one person as the primary email user. In other words, they're ultimately in charge of what gets sent out of the box, and the other person acts as the secondary user. It doesn't matter who you choose for which role so long as there's a hierarchy. Second, you're going to need to set things up technically so that you can both access the email. This may be as simple as sharing a username and password, or it may be more complex where you need to involve your IT department to create a shared account.

Once that's established, now we need some rules of the game. How are you to work together with this email inbox? Many of my clients have used a yes, no, maybe tool to establish a way of working together. Think of this as a simple piece of paper with three columns written on it. In the yes column are all the emails that the secondary user can deal with on their own.

For example, response to frequently asked questions, sales inquiries, junk email, and so on. List all the different kinds of email that might fit into the yes column. In the no column, these are the ones where you and only you should work on them, things like more complex responses, personal email, or emails from top or best customers that you absolutely need to make sure are done right. Then in the maybe column you list emails that you could discuss together.

This could happen on a weekly call where the secondary user asks the primary user whether or not they can handle them or what they should do with them. Then the work flows as follows. The secondary email user regularly logs in to the email and deals with every kind of email that they can fit in the yes column. For every email that is in the no column, they will flag it or mark it in a way that both people have agreed upon.

For example, in Gmail, starring the email in yellow communicates to the primary email user, these are your emails to deal with. Then for the maybe emails, flag them in some different way using a different color coding. Then you both know that you can talk about these in a one to one meeting. Or if the primary email user wishes, they can send a note to the secondary email user that they took care of it, or they can instruct, you can take care of it and this is how you do it.

This creates a clear pattern of communication that both of you can use to quickly and cleanly conquer that inbox.