A Professional Email Policy. Do You know that?

A Professional Email expresses the characteristics of a person who sends mail. You or your employee may send the email reflecting your employee, you, and the company. I will help you teach your employees how to use email policy.

A Professional Email builds trust in you, your company, and your Brand. Text messages, Phone calls, envelopes sent will disappear soon. But an email well-composed and drafted professionally makes customers remember and think about you.

Professional Email Policy and its need

First, it teaches your employees how to use email professionally. What’s that? You’ve never really given much thought to your employees’ emails?

Most of your employees don’t even spell check the emails. When they send to your customers and partners.

You know that Running a Business itself is a risk. We can’t predict which side the problems come. Compared with other business issues, the issues that come through the mail sent may bring court suits.

Having a good email policy can also give you a competitive advantage. Nowadays, email has become the official communication medium of choice. Composing professional and thoughtful emails can put your company ahead of the pack.

I can tell you from my experience that I have actually won contracts simply by sending emails. Because the customer was impressed that I replied to his email quickly and professionally. In other words, I’ve made more money just because I respond quickly and use a spellchecker.

Why do you need a Professional Email policy?

First of all, You must understand the ramifications of not having a Professional Email Policy. Already I wrote one world known email case about Hillary Clinton. Now we can see two hypothetical situations.

Case Situation 1:

If one of your male employees sends an email to a female employee. Unfortunately, she might have thought that was harassing her. That may become liable for damages. If her advocate comes calling with a harassment suit in hand.

Creating a company email policy also helps lay out the ground rules for the personal use of company email.

Case Situation 2:

When employees are on your clock, using your computer equipment, network, and resources. They should understand that they should not send or receive personal emails using the company email system.

This can be a hard rule to enforce, given that kids now email their moms at work after school. Those kids may send emails to everybody using the company email system. But as a rule, We Should not allow personal use of the company email system.

An effective company email policy also helps cover your corporate backside against liability. Take the example above of the potential harassment suit caused by an insulting email.

Suppose your company has a clearly-stated email policy that details what is considered inappropriate. In that cases, you can minimize the company’s liability by proving that employees are already trained about the email policy.

If you can prove that sending such emails was unacceptable under your company policy, You may reduce your liability significantly. You may use that money for donations instead of spending on legal suits.

How to implement an Email policy?

Suppose you have other existing policies in place, you can establish an email policy using the existing policies as guidelines.

Policies like business communications, access to confidential materials, personal use of the telephone, sexual harassment can add email policies with some guidelines.

In that case, you should be able to establish an email policy using the existing policies as guidelines.

If you need to start from scratch, you can still write the policy with a bit of time and research. However, many small companies (MSMEs) rely on professional consultants to do them.

When you realize the importance of an email policy, you’ll probably agree and implement it well.

An email policy doesn’t have to be a long, drawn-out document. Most policies are no more than a few pages long, written in plain English that every employee can easily understand.

The key to the success of your company email policy lies in the training of your employees. You can’t just establish a policy and expect everyone to follow blindly.

Once the policy is ready, You have to distribute it to current employees and future employees too. Explain the policy to your employees and assure them read it. And get the sign from them to signify that they understand and adhere to the rules.

Many small companies ( MSMEs) now realize the importance of email. They are putting on training seminars. This training teaches their employees how to stick to the policy and compose and respond to emails.

Here’s to your success!