Email is an integral part of a developer, It’s a must to have tool to communicate to your customer, status report to leads, off shoring model etc.
Below mentioned are few tactics that worked for me:
- When some one asks a question on email. Make sure you reply in stipulated time line. If you don’t have answer reply mentioning that you don’t know the answer. Email is just another tool and not an examination paper.
- Email is not only to communicate good news. Bad news must also be communicated even faster. When you start writing that bad news email your brain automatically thinks about alternative solutions to the problem.
- Do not write an email when you can walk over to a person’s desk or talk over a phone. That will help you to collaborate with your team. If you need to record the result of conversation you can write a “as discussed” email, this email will contain all agreed items.
- Please create a sample draft of regular emails that you send often. It will spare the boredom of drafting. Email like weekly status report, Minute of meetings, Root cause analysis, Knowledge sharing, Sick leave, the list goes one. You can have team specific emails.
- Get a basic email etiquette course for couple of hours done. You can get help from YouTube. Email without subject line, signature and attachment when it is mentioned PFA does not look good.
Happy Email!
Vikram Shetty 