From the course: Working from Home: Strategies for Success

Thoughtful communication: Use email with etiquette and care

From the course: Working from Home: Strategies for Success

Thoughtful communication: Use email with etiquette and care

- When you work from home, you need to use email wisely. Do not send a whole bunch of emails to your colleagues or your team. That's a great way to agitate people. You also don't send an email for something that really should be a phone call. Never hit Reply All. And if you do reply to something in email twice, and it's still unresolved, pick up the phone and resolve it. One of the things you want to do is make sure that you let people know when you need to hear back from them. But give people a chance to respond. Everybody is not sitting in front of their computer every minute of the day. Also, you want to write emails where you can still move forward. So use phrases like, "Unless I hear something differently, I'm going to proceed." That way, if someone reads your email and says, "Oh, wait a minute, that's not what we should be doing," they will get back to you quickly. The last thing you want to do is send an email and give it that urgent question mark or exclamation point, and feign urgency when there is none. That's a great way to get a bad reputation with your boss and irritate your coworkers. Don't do that. Use email with care, and you will make sure that you get responses when you need them.

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