Email management: strategies for optimising your communication
The average professional deals with about 42 emails daily, which can quickly drain productivity. Having a good system to organise your inbox is crucial for making the most of important information and communicating effectively. Thankfully, there are tools designed specifically to help manage this.
Email management in the workplace: Efficient strategies for organising and leveraging valuable information
Every day, the typical inbox receives 42 emails, not counting outgoing messages. This flood of emails can quickly lead to chaos and slow down productivity across the company. What’s more, emails often contain valuable information and knowledge that should be put to good use. However, the problem is that in many companies, this potential goes untapped. Eemployees send files and attachments without any structure; there are no automated workflows for forwarding emails, ownership of emails is unclear, and it is not possible to collaborate on emails together – for example, when it comes to organising a collective Outlook mailbox. With data protection regulations and rising requirements for audit-proof archiving, managing inboxes is becoming even more challenging.
To tackle these challenges and keep inboxes organised, companies need a structured approach to email management. This can be achieved with specialised tools – that can handle everything from incoming messages to audit-proof archiving, even with high volumes. Companies that invest in organised digital email management don’t just save time and boost productivity. They also improve communication with customers and partners, ultimately creating a better experience for everyone involved.
Factors behind successful email management
Resource savings and high productivity
A structured approach to email organisation helps employees quickly organise, categorise, and prioritise messages in their email inbox. This saves time and significantly reduces workload, allowing employees to concentrate on value-adding tasks.
Staying organised
A well-structured email inbox means you’ll always have a clear view of incoming messages, unread emails, emails that need to be actioned and pending tasks.
Effective communication
Making it easy and quick for employees to find and share messages improves both internal and external communication.
Less stress
A chaotic, unstructured email inbox increases unnecessary pressure on employees.
Reduced reaction, idle and transport times
By clearly categorising emails by priority, implementing automated forwarding rules, and clearly defining responsibilities, employees can respond to inquiries swiftly and streamline processes.
Email management software and tools for modern business challenges
Effective email management in today’s business world requires powerful software tools.
Information platforms such as nscale provide comprehensive data management that includes email organisation. These tools centralise and structure information, allowing businesses to automate entire processes and boost administrative efficiency.
nscale offers various features for email organisation, including:
Email management and organisation
Automate, assign and prioritise messages automatically.
Advanced filter and search functions
Rule-based automatic forwarding and advanced search filters for emails and information.
Collaboration and sharing
Collaboration functions let teams tackle emails as a group.
Integration and automation
Automate workflows for seamless integration of email contents into calendars, task lists and existing IT systems.
Archiving and analysis
The flexibility and scalability of nscale make it a valuable solution for businesses of all sizes. Its functions not only make day-to-day work easier for employees but also enhance communication with external stakeholders such as partners and customers by having a more efficient structure for managing and responding to emails.
Tips for better email habits
Modern technology gives us powerful tools to manage incoming and outgoing messages, file emails logically, and maintain a structured, clean inbox. However, even the best systems only work when paired with good habits. How your employees manage their email matters just as much as the technology they use.
The following tips can help you to maintain an overview in everyday business and administration:
Schedule email time
Set fixed times for checking and processing emails to minimise interruptions. Consider temporarily closing your email management software or turning off notifications of incoming messages during focused work periods.
Clear prioritisation
Organise your e-mail inbox by priority and process associated tasks in order of importance.
Avoid unnecessary emails
Unsubscribe from newsletters and other subscriptions, to reduce the number of inbound emails.
Clear folder structure
Structure and organise your email inbox. Even standard email management applications such as Outlook or Thunderbird provide basic functions for doing this.
Delete or archive
Decide whether an email should be deleted, archived or processed. Regularly tidy up your email inbox to organise and structure it.
Using e-mail management tools
Take advantage of modern email management systems such as nscale to streamline the efficient management of emails.
Legally compliant e-mail archiving
While no single law defines email archiving requirements, several regulations determine how businesses must save emails. These include principles for proper electronic record-keeping (GoBD), the German Fiscal Code, and the Commercial Code. Different industries may face additional requirements that dictate which emails need saving, for how long, and under what conditions.
The Verband Organisations and Information Systems (VOI) has outlined ten guiding principles for legally compliant email archiving. These include having a complete record of relevant emails and archiving them early. Archived emails must correspond to the original, be stored unalterably, and with access only permitted for authorised persons.
Additionally, you need to ensure emails can be quickly found and completely restored at all times. While you must follow required retention timeframes, don’t forget GDPR requirements as certain emails must be deleted after specific periods to protect personal data.
Any changes to archived emails need to be logged, with the ability to revert to the original version whenever needed. Your archiving process should be transparent enough for third parties, such as auditors, to review. When upgrading or transferring your email archive, you must maintain compliance standards throughout the process. Proper audit-proof archiving is crucial for meeting your legal obligations.
What exactly is legally compliant
email archiving?
Legally compliant email archiving refers to the process of securely storing emails for required periods of time in a way that easily makes them searchable. This not only ensures that emails are archived in accordance with legal requirements, but it also ensures you can restore archived emails when needed.
Email archiving isn’t optimal, it’s a legal requirement
The law requires proper archiving of business communication. This obligation covers all tax-relevant messages and anything that qualifies as business correspondence. The email retention requirement does not apply if the email is only used to deliver attachments or marketing messages like newsletters, advertising emails and similar.
What types of emails must be stored?
Invoicing and accounting documents, contracts and other legal agreements, business correspondence, order confirmations, personal information, insurance policies and any e-mails with tax or commercial significance.
The advantages of our email archiving software
Using specialised archiving software offers several advantages. Beyond meeting legal requirements, they also establish fast, efficient and automated document management and email archiving. This protects data against loss and corruption, ensures data and document integrity and provides transparent logging and version tracking. It also reduces the time employees need to spend to ensure legally compliant email archiving, reduces storage costs for small companies, and significantly reduces the load on email servers.
The functions of nscale at a glance
Standard email applications such as Outlook can’t handle significant archiving needs. They struggle with large volumes of emails and don’t provide audit-proof archiving. This is where an information platform such as nscale steps in. The solution not only manages all information in one central, organised system which makes finding information quick and easy. It’s specifically designed for secure email backup and archiving, including entire Outlook mailboxes. The nscale archive handles physical storage and works with numerous credible storage solutions. Thanks to its open architecture and sophisticated interfaces, it integrates smoothly into virtually any existing IT infrastructure. nscale stores emails in standard formats, ensuring you’ll be able to access your messages even decades later.
FAQs
What is email management?
Email is one of the most important professional communication tools. According to the digital association Bitkom, 100 percent of German companies use email as a communication channel. Email management helps optimise how companies handle messages. It manages the large volumes of incoming and outgoing messages and improves internal and external communication by optimising administrative processes such as central filing and audit-proof archiving.
Does e-mail management work with Outlook?
Outlook offers basic email management features that let users organise their inbox and manage shared mailboxes. However, these tools are limited. For comprehensive management that truly optimises your email structure, more powerful, specialised software is necessary.
Why do we need e-mail management?
As email volumes grow, companies struggle to keep up without effective management systems. Powerful solutions like nscale offer tools that increase business productivity, reduce employee stress, and improve company-wide communication.
Which emails need to be archived and which don't?
A retention obligation applies to emails if they are relevant under tax or commercial law. Companies should refrain from archiving emails that do not fall into these categories, as well as personal and private messages.
What does audit-proof archiving mean by law?
Legally audit-proof archiving ensures the integrity of messages throughout their entire retention period – meaning emails remain unaltered.
How long do companies have to archive emails?
Legal retention periods typically range from eight to ten years. Starting January 1, 2025, the Fourth Bureaucracy Relief Act (BEG IV) will reduce accounting document retention to eight years. For emails not subject to legal requirements, retention times are up to individual companies based on their individual needs.
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